


Trial and Error

by QuokkaMocha



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Gallifreyan Culture (Doctor Who), Gen, Mild Language, Minor Violence, Multi-Doctor, Post-Time War (Doctor Who), Pre-Time War (Doctor Who), Referenced Time War (Doctor Who), Serial: s143 The Trial of a Time Lord, Time War (Doctor Who)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:42:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 60,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24891793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuokkaMocha/pseuds/QuokkaMocha
Summary: The Twelfth Doctor goes looking for Missy's lost TARDIS, which has fallen into the hands of a collector of Time War memorabilia. Only during the operation, he inadvertently releases one of his most feared adversaries - The Valeyard. Dragged back to Zenobia Station, through a loophole in the time lock around Gallifrey, the Doctor, Bill, Nardole and Missy find themselves caught up in the events of the Doctor's trial. If they mess things up, the effects on the timeline could be catastrophic, but just by being there, they've already changed the course of history. It's up to the Doctor to make sure things stay as he remembers them and preserve Gallifrey's and his own timeline, but the question is, how far is he willing to go to do that? And with several enemies on the station with him, it might be all he can do to survive.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> ‘Trial of a Time Lord’ is one of the first Doctor Who serials I remember watching live when I was young, and I’ve had a soft spot for it ever since. Around 1999 or 2000, I wrote a massively long fan fiction based on the story, explaining the origins of the Valeyard and trying to make a bit of sense of what actually went on during the course of Trial’s fourteen episodes. This was, of course, before the 2005 reboot. That story, ‘Grand Guignol’, was one of my favourite projects ever, although it’s a bit cringe-making when I re-read it nowadays. I was a lot younger back in 2000. I remember though being completely lost in the world when I was writing it, in a way I’ve never experienced with any writing projects since, and I really wanted to try and find that feeling again. I also wanted to see if it was possible to rewrite the story but take into account all the changes in lore and canon since the 2005 series. So that’s how this story developed. 
> 
> I chose to use Twelve as the ‘main’ Doctor firstly because he’s my favourite and secondly because, back when Peter Capaldi began his run as the Doctor in ‘Deep Breath’, there was a lot of speculation in the fandom as to whether this darker version of the Doctor was being set up to become the Valeyard, who, after all, is supposed to appear between ‘the twelfth and final regeneration’. I thought it might be fun to play with that idea. 
> 
> The story is based primarily on the television show, and not really the expanded universe, so I’ve not taken into account the comics, BBC novels or various Big Finish dramas that feature the Valeyard or the Gallifrey series. Hopefully that doesn’t detract from anyone’s enjoyment.
> 
> In terms of continuity, for the Doctor, Bill and Nardole, this story takes place just after The Eaters of Light.

[](https://ibb.co/bNN5ccK)

Doctor Who – Trial and Error

_Long before the Time War, the Time Lords knew it was coming, like a storm on the wind. There were many prophecies and stories, legends before the fact…_

The Doctor – _Heaven Sent_

Prologue

Gallifrey, the Golden Age

The second sun had only just risen over the southern mountains when a group of clerks set out from the Lord President’s office and spread out across the Citadel, each of them carrying a dispatch sealed with the official mark of the High Council. Red circular script on the cover declared the contents ‘Top Secret’. Some headed to the chambers of the High Council themselves. One descended into the labyrinth of rooms where the Matrix was monitored and maintained by the Keeper and his staff. Another made for an ornate doorway near the Panopticon, where the circular script above the lintel read, ‘Halls of Law’.

There, in a wide tiled foyer, secretaries and lawyers were busy setting up their desks, gossiping in small groups and readying themselves to start the day’s work. The clerk passed by them all, ignoring the curious glances she received. Her attention was focused on the broad staircase at the far end. At the top, an archway loomed over her like the mouth of a cave in a fairy story. The sign above it read, ‘Junior Judicial Chambers’. She paused only long enough to check the name on the cover of her file, then headed off down the long corridor beyond the arch. This seemed to stretch on into infinity thanks to its dimensional engineering, and hundreds of doors lined both sides, each with a brass name plate to indicate whose office the door belonged to.

This early in the day, most of these doors still had the quiet, sleepy feel of a place waiting for occupation as the clerk passed by. One, though, about halfway down, lay ajar. The last the clerk slowed her pace a little as she came to this door, and read the name on the plaque, checked it against her file. This was the right room. Inside, she could hear someone pacing about, footsteps making the floor creak, and someone spoke with a deep voice, every word clipped and precise.

‘It is my unpleasant duty,’ the voice said, ‘to prove to this inquiry that the accused is an incorrigible…’

The clerk pressed the call button on the door and the words stopped abruptly.

‘Pause dictation. Who is it?’

The clerk strode into the office. The edges of the room were hazy, again thanks to the architects tinkering with the internal dimensions. Bookcases appeared like islands on a misty sea. It was impossible to see the far wall. A bank of fog had gathered there. Before her, though, lay a large desk, its surface glowing with moving text, some of it hidden beneath more old-school solid paper and books. The clerk came to the desk and bowed curtly to the tall, dark-haired man who stood opposite her.

‘Forgive the intrusion, Lord Dolyn.’

She laid the file she’d carried on his desk. He glanced at it, and she saw the flash of comprehension in his green eyes.

He nodded and pressed his hand against the cover of the file. There was a bleep, as the reader built into it scanned and recognised his palm print, then sent the information back to the Matrix. The red symbols on the file turned blue, and whereas the clerk would not have been able to open the folder, even if she’d wanted to, it would now release its contents whenever Dolyn required them.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

The clerk gave another stiff bow, then hurried out.

***

Dolyn tapped the interface on his desk and closed the notes for the speech he’d been practising, then flung back his black and white robes of office and sat in his high-backed chair. He opened the dispatch folder and studied the contents, though it was merely the written confirmation of a dozen hushed and secretive conversations in offices around the Capitol over the last few months. He sighed and ran a hand through his short brown hair, then he reached for the glowing symbol on the desk that activated the communications software. He selected a contact and waited until an air display appeared above the desk. The blue-tinged image of an elderly Time Lady appeared. She frowned.

‘My lord? Is everything all right? I was just about to pack the little ones off to the Academy.’

‘Yes, I understand. I only wanted to say that it’s been confirmed. I shall be required to go off-world for a time for this case. I thought you ought to know.’

She nodded, but still looked unhappy. ‘Have they said for how long?’

‘Not yet. No real way to tell.’ Dolyn leaned back in his chair.

‘I suppose you still can’t say what it’s all about.’

‘Afraid not. But tell the boys I’ll be back soon, and I’ll send a message if I’m able. Comms may be censored once the court’s in session.’

‘Very good, sir. I’ll tell them.’

He switched off the comms channel, then stared for a while at a static image that formed part of the regular display on the desk’s surface. A pale, dark haired woman held two boys in her arms and smiled towards the camera lens. The children, so identical that even their parents sometimes had to give a slight telepathic nudge to each boy to tell who was who, stared, wide-eyed. They were bigger now, he thought, and pictured them how they would be right at that moment, in their novice’s robes. He didn’t allow himself to think about the woman, Alyssa. It had been years, but he still couldn’t say her name or look at her image for long without seeing the flash of a blaster in his mind’s eye, or hearing the clatter of Sontaran boots through a city - across a planet - that had thought itself impenetrable. . He sometimes wondered what she would think of him even considering a second marriage and then the guilt would strike him when he remembered all the recent times he’d actually forgotten her, for the briefest moment, in another’s company. Safer to stick to work, at least for now. He returned his attention to the dossier before him.

The doorbell rang again, and he glanced up to see his secretary on the threshold, looking even more harassed than was customary.

‘Sorry, Dolyn,’ he said in a low voice, ‘but the Castellan just called. Something about a meeting this morning…?’

Dolyn checked the time display on the desk and cursed under his breath. He swept up the dispatch along with a folder of his own notes and shoved past the secretary and out into the hall.

He passed through the bustle of the Citadel and crossed the Panopticon, where the great and good of Gallifrey had gathered for their morning’s gossip, though no one paid a mere lawyer any notice. Right behind the great Seal of Rassilon that dominated the plaza, he hurried down a narrow flight of stairs that he hadn’t even realised were there until all this business started. The stairs spilled out into a dimly-lit corridor, at the end of which, he made out a group of figures in the shadows beneath a vaulted archway, beside an ornate set of double doors. Amongt them, he spotted the bronze robes of the current Castellan, though he had only spoken to him through comms, never met him in person. The Castellan was flanked by two chancellery guards, but there was another, stouter man with him, in a stiff, square collar and gold robes.

‘Valeyard,’ the Castellan called out. ‘We thought perhaps you were lost.’

Dolyn struggled to hide his embarrassment and his annoyance. With a surreptitious glance at the time display on his wrist comms he saw it was only five minutes after the agreed time of their meeting.

‘My apologies, Castellan,’ he said, with a politic smile. ‘I only just received the relevant information from the High Council.’

He reached them at last, aware that the smaller man in gold was watching him with an air of hauteur and just a touch of suspicion.

‘You know the Keeper of the Matrix?’ the Castellan asked.

‘Only by reputation.’ Dolyn offered his hand to the man in gold.

‘Valeyard…?’ asked the Keeper.

‘Dolyn. Junior Judicial Chambers.’

‘Junior?’ The Keeper looked appalled. ‘I thought the High Council were taking this seriously?’

Dolyn struggled to maintain his smile.

‘A quirk of terminology, Keeper. Senior Chambers is the name given to the members of the High Council and other Time Lords appointed to head inquiries or special courts. The junior chamber consists of the likes of us. Those who actually studied the law.’

‘They’re lawyers, Keeper,’ said the Castellan. ‘You can’t expect them to actually say what they mean. Shall we get this over with?’

‘Excellent idea,’ said the Keeper dryly.

He turned from them and went to the double doors. A large, antique-style key hung on a hook on the chest panel of his robes. The Keeper unlatched it and inserted it into a recess in the door’s access panel. Locking mechanisms somewhere inside the wall clunked and whirred. Until that point, Dolyn hadn’t given much consideration to the location of this meeting. It had just been words in a confidential message, but now the doors were opening, he found his hearts quickening. He’d never been to the Cloisters before. He knew it somehow allowed access to the workings of the Matrix, that it was dark, and deadly enough that anyone who entered without proper training rarely came out again. He was one of those Time Lords who allowed the Matrix to run his daily life, keep the time accurate on his wrist comms, control the temperature in his quarters, provide lessons for his children, store his experiences and thoughts, without actually having a clue how any of it worked.

‘The wraiths are fairly quiet today,’ the Keeper muttered. ‘Shouldn’t present too much of a problem, but if they should appear, please leave them to me.’

The Castellan and Keeper headed in, while the guards stayed behind in the corridor, presumably to stop anyone following them. Dolyn passed through the doorway into what looked like a ruin, gothic arches and pillars rising from a low mist. Vines, ivy, and what looked like some kind of power or data cabling twisted around the stones and snaked off into the fog. The corridor outside had been quiet but here, the silence was like a solid thing that pressed in all around them. Thick shadows swirled on the fog, and debris littered the place as if the whole structure was crumbling around them. Dolyn glanced up and realised he’d fallen far behind the Keeper and the Castellan while he’d been looking around, and quickened his pace to catch up. Ahead, he saw them pass beneath an archway and disappear around a bend in the path. Dolyn followed, turned the corner, and came face to face with a stone angel.

He froze, fighting not to blink. The angel’s mouth gaped in a snarl, showing sharply pointed teeth, and its clawed hands were raised above its head as if to strike.

Something touched his shoulder. Dolyn let out a cry of fright and whirled around, then felt the grip of panic as he realised he’d turned his back on the creature. The Keeper, still with a hand on the stiff collar of Dolyn’s robes, sighed and shook his head.

‘Quite inert, Valeyard,’ he said, then wandered over to the angel. Now, as he caught his breath and tried to stop his hearts from bursting through his rib cage, Dolyn saw that the creature was tangled in a mass of cables.

‘The Matrix is more than capable of defending itself,’ the Keeper went on. ‘Over the centuries, some have tried to invade it. All have failed. Those who manage to infiltrate its inner workings are neutralised by the Wraiths, and in some cases even form part of the system, their biological energy feeding the Matrix’s processes.’ He patted the angel on the shoulder, then moved off.

It took a great mental feat for Dolyn to drag his gaze off the angel, but he forced himself to move and carried on after the Keeper and Castellan. As they continued through the Cloisters, he spotted other creatures, other monsters in amongst the rubble, some only shapes beneath the cables. The thought hit him like a blast of ice water that he might turn a corner and see the corpse of a Sontaran. He wasn’t sure he’d have the will to keep calm if that were the case.

‘I expect, however,’ the Keeper was saying up ahead, ‘that it is this particular invader that interests you, gentlemen.’

He was standing before a fractured piece of white wall with a recessed arch set into it. Inside the arch, suspended with arms outstretched, like a piece of laundry at a Drylands barn, was a Time Lord. Cables wound around his body, half obscuring his face, but not enough to hide the fact that he had apparently died screaming.

‘His name was Alzath,’ said the Keeper. ‘Junior diagnostician in my team. Until his body was discovered here, I would have said he was a promising young man.’

Dolyn stepped closer, peering upwards at the body. There was no obvious cause of death, no visible injuries, and nothing to explain why the unfortunate Alzath hadn’t been able to regenerate.

‘We’ve analysed the data logs,’ the Keeper continued, ‘now we knew what to look for. It would appear Alzath had been downloading files using an unmonitored interface in this section. Those files were transmitted off-world, we believe to one of the Third Zone planets in Andromeda, but they were using a relay point. My people are working to track down the exact location now.’

‘We know what he was doing,’ said the Castellan, dismissively. ‘The Celestial Intervention Agency submitted a full report on the Third Zone’s time travel experiments and it’s been dealt with. We knew their level of development wouldn’t have progress so far in so little time. Something had to have spurred their work along. Now we know what it was.’

‘I’m afraid it’s worse than that,’ said the Keeper. ‘Alzath had been accessing the files the High Council had asked me to quarantine. The prophecies.’

‘Ah,’ said Dolyn. He clutched the dispatch folder a little tighter to his chest.

The Castellan had lost his air of nonchalance and stood a little straighter.

‘Is there any possibility anyone saw what was in those files?’ he asked. ‘Besides the High Council, I mean.’

‘I can’t say for certain,’ replied the Keeper. ‘We introduced malware as soon as the breach was detected, but we have no way of telling whether we were in time or not.’

The three of them stood for a moment in silence, regarding the lifeless figure on the wall. Dolyn could see the Castellan’s mind working, figuring out the many consequences if that information had been leaked.

‘Why didn’t the Wraiths stop him?’ the Castellan asked. ‘Isn’t that what they’re for?’

‘The Wraiths don’t tend to come near this area,’ said the Keeper. ‘Alzath would’ve known that. He often came down here to troubleshoot the infrastructural servers for the Capitol systems.’

‘The Wraiths are dead, what do they have to worry about?’

‘Technically, dead,’ said the Keeper, ‘although it might be more accurate to think of them in terms of artificial intelligence. The Wraiths are simply data shadows of former Time Lords and they’re usually only capable of following simple programming but a few still have a tendril or two or their old emotions, their old thought processes, left over from their connection to the Matrix whilst they were alive.’

‘So what are they scared of?’ asked Dolyn.

The Keeper wandered to another archway nearby, where the shadows were too dense to see far beyond the threshold. He stood a few feet away and gestured towards the darkness.

‘We believe it’s because this is where we keep the Partition.’

The more Dolyn studied the shadows, the more he could see within them. There were shapes within the darkness, constantly moving, so that it was hard to focus on them before they shifted into some other pattern, some other form. He ventured nearer, trying to make out the details, but the Keeper caught his arm.

‘I wouldn’t recommend getting too close, Valeyard.’

‘What is it?’ asked the Castellan.

‘Every Time Lord past, present and future has a connection to the Matrix,’ said the Keeper. ‘Every memory and experience is stored within its systems, but the Matrix also controls the everyday running of Time Lord society. There are certain impulses, negative experiences for example, that can interfere with those functions, so we ensure they’re kept separate from the main archives.’

He threw a wary glance at the shadows. ‘Those impulses are stored in a Partition.’

‘The nightmares of all Gallifrey,’ said the Castellan with a slight sneer.

‘All Gallifrey?’ The Keeper gave a dry laugh. ‘Not at all. We lead a fairly tranquil life here, relatively speaking. No, this is a side effect of one particular person whose lifestyle is, shall we say, atypical of Time Lord society.’

The Castellan nodded. ‘The Doctor.’

The name made Dolyn’s shiver. He had never learned exactly what happened during the Vardan-Sontaran invasion, or how exactly Alyssa had died, but he knew the Doctor had been at the heart of it. The mention of that Time Lord had always made his stomach turn.

Despite the warning, Dolyn edged a little closer to the Partition. He wondered if, somewhere in the writhing mass of shadow, he might see some memory of those days. Perhaps he’d even see Alyssa, though he doubted if the Doctor would even have been aware of the individuals who died. Someone who swept around the universe like an avenging god probably didn’t have time to care about the little people.

Deep within the darkness, Dolyn saw faces phasing in and out of existence, changing from one image to another, and at the very edge of his hearing, he felt sure there were voices, other than that of the Castellan and Keeper.

‘You met him, didn’t you, Maxil?’ he heard the Keeper say.

‘Last regeneration. Not an experience I’d wish to recreate,’ said the Castellan.

‘Do you need to see anything else?’

The conversation seemed to grow more distant as Dolyn focused on the whispers in the darkness. Had it just spoken his name? Then a hand landed on his shoulder and the spell was broken. He turned and found the Keeper looking up at him.

‘Valeyard?’

Glancing back at the archway, Dolyn saw the shadows recede a little, but the ever-shifting patterns continued, as did the whispering. The other two Time Lords did not appear to hear it.

‘Are you all right?’ the Keeper asked.

Dolyn shook himself out of his stupor and smiled.

‘Oh, no, thank you. I just need to take some images, in case I need them for evidence at the inquiry.’

He watched the two of them start back towards the door, walking slowly and talking in low voices. Dolyn found the imager application on his comms unit and snapped off a few pictures for his files. He didn’t pay much attention to composition or quality. He would be glad to get out of that place too.

He stepped back from Alzath’s body and was about to follow the others, when he noticed the archway that had held the Partition.

The shadows were gone. All he could see now was a path wending off into the fog. He frowned. Was it supposed to do that? Fascinating though the thing was, he decided it was time to go. He finally turned.

And found the shadows in his path. The faces within the darkness screamed at him in unison.

***

‘Do you believe it?’ asked the Castellan. He studied the Keeper’s expression, though it was hard to see the other man’s face in the half light, and through the uncomfortable-looking collar he wore. ‘That there’ll actually be a war?’

‘I’ve seen the predictions,’ said the Keeper. ‘Whether they turn out to be correct or not, only time can tell. The Matrix has been wrong before. Any system reliant on biological input for its computational power will be prone to inaccuracy from time to time.’

‘But it’s never been so insistent before.’ Maxil shivered, despite his heavy robes. ‘And can’t you feel it? It’s like the first winds of a storm on the air. Something’s coming.’

A scream cut through the silence of the Cloisters. The Castellan drew his gun and ran. In the middle of the path ahead, he saw a figure crouched on his haunches. Maxil couldn’t be sure in this maze, but he thought the figure was beneath the archway where that thing, the Partition or whatever it was, had been, though there was no sign of it now. He held his staser in both hands to steady his aim and watched as the figure slowly rose, collecting up his scattered papers.

‘Valeyard?’

The lawyer turned and stared back at him, expression unreadable.

‘What happened?’ asked the Castellan.

For a long time the Valeyard seemed distracted and didn’t answer. He ran his hand over the back of his head and frowned, like a man in the throes of a regeneration sensing his new body for the first time. Then he blinked and straightened.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all. My apologies, Castellan. Just… jumping at shadows.’

***

The trees below the Capitol gave a shiver as a night breeze passed over the plains. A few silver leaves flittered down and landed amongst the flame-red grass. Most of the city slept, but even in the dead of night there were still lights burning in its towers.

The Lord President couldn’t fathom why the Castellan couldn’t have scheduled this meeting for a more civilised hour. Moving around the citadel this late, he could practically hear the rodents scurrying inside the walls, and he kept picturing the bottle of four hundred year-old Patraxe wine he had in his quarters that he’d planned to decimate that evening. Instead, here he found himself seated at the head of his conference table in the middle of the night, staring down at reports he’d read so many times, the circular script just seemed to twirl meaninglessly.

‘A junior diagnostician would not have had the credentials to access files marked priority Omega,’ said the Castellan. That man was always so intense, thought the Lord President. It was a surprise he hadn’t made himself spontaneously regenerate. ‘Someone had to have helped.’

‘And,’ the Lord President said, ‘I take it we are no closer to finding out who?’

‘We have a theory.’

The Castellan glanced across the table, where the Keeper of the Matrix sat fidgeting.

‘I took the liberty of running a statistical analysis of the Matrix’s predictions, Lord President,’ said the Keeper. ‘Many of the warnings are vague, as always, but there was one name that occurred in practically all of them. The Time Lord who will be instrumental in, and ultimately end, the Time War.’

‘We are not calling it the ‘Time War’,’ the Lord President chided. ‘It is not a war of any sort. It’s a bogeyman thrown up by the Matrix to remind us all we cannot be complacent. The idea’s ridiculous. No race has ever successfully invaded Gallifrey, or at least, none have ever managed to hold the planet. Our defences are more than adequate.’

‘Against the Daleks?’ asked the Castellan.

‘If necessary. The sky trenches are…’

‘With all due respect, Lord President,’ the Castellan had the audacity to interrupt, ‘whether the war itself is a feasible possibility or not is beside the point. The fact is that there are obviously those within our society who have heard about this prophecy and who believe it, enough to steal information from the Matrix and send it off-world to try and rally support.’

The Lord President bristled. Technically his Castellan was right but it was irksome to have to admit it.

‘Are we any closer to identifying the recipients of this information?’ he asked.

The Keeper of the Matrix consulted his notes. ‘The ultimate destination, we believe, was somewhere in Andromeda, probably the Third Zone. We are as yet no closer to pinpointing the exact location…’

‘Someone was sending the Third Zone information on time travel,’ said the Castellan.

‘I am aware of that,’ the Lord President replied. ‘The CIA…’

‘Have dealt with it, yes, for the moment. But someone wants to build an army. They think Gallifrey isn’t listening to the warnings and they are trying to equip others to fight the Daleks for us.’

‘If I may?’ the Keeper ventured, actually raising his hand like an Academy student. ‘We haven’t been able to track down the location _in_ Andromeda where the information was received. However, we have identified the site of the data relays the thieves were using to pass the information _to_ Andromeda.’

‘Where?’

The Keeper tapped a few commands into the display on the desk in front of him and a hologram of a planetary system appeared in the air above the centre of the table, eight planets and various satellites and asteroid belts, orbiting a small, yellow star.

‘Sol Three, Mutter’s Spiral. I believe it’s also known by the local designations, ‘Terra’, or ‘Earth’. The files taken from our archives were sent to a collection point there and then forwarded to their ultimate destination. I have no knowledge of law enforcement, gentlemen, but it occurred to me there might be something on that planet to identify the culprits.’

‘We know who the culprit is,’ insisted the Castellan. ‘The fact that it’s Earth only proves it.’

‘Circumstantial evidence only, I’m afraid,’ said the final guest at their table. This one the Lord President didn’t know by name, but the black and white robes were enough to identify his position at least. This had to be the Valeyard sent down by the Hall of Law to advise him, though so far this was the first time the sullen-looking fellow had broken his silence.

‘Well,’ the Lord President muttered. ‘Whoever’s responsible, I’ve had far too many messages already asking me to confirm or deny what the Matrix is predicting. And I for one should like to continue denying it.’

‘What harm could there be in letting people prepare?’ asked the Castellan. The Lord President could hear the strain in his voice, as if it was taking his every reserve of strength not to lose his temper. ‘At best, we can all breathe a sigh of relief when it turns out to be just another false alarm from the Matrix. At worse, we can be ready when the attack comes.’

‘According to the Matrix’s predictions,’ said the Valeyard, ‘it doesn’t matter how prepared we are. This war will end Gallifrey.’

‘Enough,’ the Lord President said. ‘For the time being, I do not want these rumours running around our cities. Gallifrey is still in a delicate political state after the Borusa affair and we do not need another scandal, nor indeed another panic. Besides, if you’re right, Maxil, and the Doctor is involved, then best to tread carefully. For some unfathomable reason, the ordinary people seem to like him.’

‘It has to be the Doctor,’ insisted the Castellan. ‘He served as Lord President. He would have the necessary codes to access the Matrix and could have passed them to this Alzath character. He’s fought the Daleks countless times. They’d probably never have crawled away from Skaro in the first place if it wasn’t for his interference, and he refused to destroy them when he was asked to by the High Council. His name is littered through the Matrix prophecies. By all accounts it will be his actions that will ultimately destroy this planet. You know how critical he’s been of our policies. Whoever sent that information to the Third Zone evidently thinks they have a better idea how to rule Gallifrey than the High Council. Tell me, who else would fit that description?’

‘The Doctor himself was sent to investigate the Kartz and Reimer experiments in the Third Zone,’ the Lord President began.

‘In an earlier regeneration. He’s had more than enough reasons since then to think ill of this government. Lord President, the Matrix is adamant that war is coming. There has never been so consistent a set of predictions since the days of Rassilon. And if the Doctor is allowed to roam free and continues to interfere, the Matrix is equally insistent that Gallifrey will fall. You may wish to contain the rumours, sir, that is your prerogative. I daresay, I’m a soldier, not a politician. But we must prepare for this.’

‘You’ll be asking to go to Andromeda yourself, next, Castellan,’ said the Lord President. ‘Raise a time army of your own.’

‘Whether the news of the prophecy is released or not,’ said the Valeyard, ‘the fact is that a serious data breach has been committed and we now have a definite lead on the perpetrators…’

‘Quite,’ said the Lord President, happy to have someone sound at least partially on his side. ‘This Earth planet will have to be isolated until we can be sure we’ve recovered our files. We can’t have anything else transmitted to Andromeda until we know what’s going on.’

‘Hard to isolate the planet,’ said the Castellan. ‘Thanks to the Doctor, there’s so much temporal damage, that repulsive lump of rock practically shines throughout the fabric of time like a supernova. The only way would be to…’

The Lord President saw a thoughtful expression cross the Castellan’s face like a shadow.

‘What?’ the President asked.

‘There may be a way,’ said the Castellan, with an air of reluctance. ‘But the technology is extremely unstable. It can only be used under an Order in High Council, and the damage to the ecosystem of the planet can be catastrophic.’

‘Well? Out with it, man.’ the Lord President prompted.

The Castellan sighed. ‘We could use the Magnetron. Remove Earth from its current spatial co-ordinates and relocate it in a part of space that’s easier to keep secure while we conduct a forensic sweep of the surface. But it would…’

‘Do it,’ said the Lord President.

‘But, sir…’

‘And as for the Doctor,’ the President interrupted. He had checked his time display and saw that night was rapidly heading towards morning. ‘The Valeyard is quite correct. We have nothing more than coincidence and rumour at the moment. Not enough to secure a conviction. The Doctor has wriggled his way out of our justice system on several past occasions, when there’s been far more of a case against him than this.’

‘There may be a more lateral solution,’ said the Valeyard. ‘As you say, Lord President, the Doctor has been tried on many occasions. There are no shortages of violations he’s committed. We might try the Al Capone approach.’

‘The what?’

The Valeyard looked wary for a brief moment, as if he’d spoken out of turn. When he carried on, his attention was back on his notes again. ‘My apologies, it was an Earth reference, My Lord. What I mean to say is, if we cannot find enough evidence to convict the Doctor of the data breach, we might secure his arrest and detention on some other charge, some other transgression of our laws. There should be no shortage of instances to choose from. And with the Doctor imprisoned or, if you should deem it necessary, eliminated entirely, then his involvement in the Matrix prophecies also becomes impossible.’

‘Rendering the prophecy itself in paradox,’ muttered the President. He made a mental note to find out this fellow’s name. He was beginning to like him. ‘Indeed. Where precisely is the Doctor, relevant to this time stream?’

‘A planet called Thoros Beta,’ said the Valeyard. He tapped his desktop interface and the image of Earth above the table was replaced by that of a man with blond curls and a frightful multicoloured coat, walking along the shoreline of a lurid pink ocean.

‘It would be safer not to bring him to Gallifrey,’ the Lord President said, thinking out loud.

‘There’s always Zenobia Station,’ said the Valeyard. ‘It is easily isolated, should there be any… trouble from the Doctor.’

‘It would need to be upgraded,’ said the Keeper. ‘Zenobia’s links to the Matrix are running on the old operating system. They won’t cope with the latest updates unless I can replace some of the hardware. I have been meaning to get round to it.’

The Lord President nodded. ‘Then do it.’

‘Lord President.’ The Keeper rose, bowed and left the room.

‘And you, Castellan, make whatever preparations are necessary for the Magnetron. I shall sign whichever forms are required. We cannot afford to delay.’

The Castellan did not look happy, but when did he ever? But in the end, he too left his seat and headed out.

‘And you, Valeyard…’ The Lord President waited for the man to give his name but the Valeyard just stared back at him. ‘I trust I can rely on you to ensure the case against the Doctor is entirely watertight?’

The Valeyard shifted slightly in his chair. ‘There is no such thing outside the world of fiction as a watertight case, Lord President, and the Doctor, while he may not have actually studied the law, has certainly broken it enough times that he may well find a way out. Unless…’

‘Unless?’

‘So far all our plans rely on the case against the Doctor being entirely… above board, shall we say?’

The Lord President watched as the Valeyard got up and wandered around the table, studying the image of the Doctor on the beach.

‘If, on the other hand, things were… I believe the vulgar expression is ‘rigged in our favour’, we might be more assured of a positive outcome.’

‘You mean set him up? Is that possible?’

‘I’m sure I could arrange something.’

The President heard the additional clause to that sentence in the silence that followed. ‘And what would you ask in return?’

The Valeyard gave a light shrug, reached out and touched the air display, turning the screen around in a seemingly idle gesture. ‘The Doctor is currently in his sixth regeneration, I believe. That would place him around halfway through his life cycle.’

‘Your point being?’

‘My point, Lord President, is that should he be eliminated now, his remaining store of regeneration energy, his remaining lives as it were, would be destroyed with him.’

The Lord President scratched his beard and nodded. He now saw where this was going.

‘You want the rest of his regenerations.’ The Valeyard, he reasoned, must be nearing the end of his own final lifetime. The Lord President felt some of the tension that had been twisting up his innards loosen its hold. He liked when things, and more so when people, made sense.

The Valeyard said nothing, but the understanding was already there between them.

‘You realise,’ said the Lord President, ‘that should anything go wrong, my involvement in this cannot be known.’

‘You can rely on my discretion,’ said the Valeyard. They smiled at one another, having reached their accord, then the Valeyard bowed and left the room.

The Lord President studied the image of the Doctor a while longer before switching off the display. Then he clapped his hands and hurried off to his quarters and his wine.

***

A storm flashed over the dark clouds in the distance beyond the trees and ruins. Moments later, thunder growled. The rain pattered against the dead leaves that covered what had once been a wide street in one of the planet’s largest cities. The Valeyard made his way slowly along the ancient route, towards a large building straight ahead that stood starkly white against the glowering skies, its dome like a broken eggshell.

This city, he thought, had once been home to millions of humans. Now it was barely visible. A few stones in a forest. The only life he could sense around him were the guards and forensic scientists on the expedition. Project ‘Ravalox’, as it had become known, had been in operation for two days, and so far no trace of the Andromedan agents had been found. Whatever equipment or technology they’d used to transfer their secrets back to their home galaxy, they had hidden it well.

Behind him, the guards barked commands and questions across the damp air, but he paid little attention to them. Instead, the Valeyard approached the building ahead. Beneath the dome, a set of wide stone steps led to what had once been a large entrance, but was now a mass of fallen pillars and broken stones. He wasn’t sure if the damage to the place was entirely down to the strain of the planet’s transfer to this new location, or if Earth had been in the last stages of its life even before the Time Lords came, but this city was certainly dead now. Even the ghosts probably left long ago.

As he climbed the steps, however, the Valeyard looked up at the dome and thought of Cybermen, of maniacs who used the dead as an army, of the dome itself opening up, and a dozen other monsters that had walked the streets of this city when it was still alive. All of them fought and all of them defeated and for what? Every small battle that was ever won only served to remove the feebler enemies, leaving the strongest behind. This Time War, he thought as he entered the main chamber and stepped carefully over the rubble, is the inevitable consequence of interference. When these aliens knew they had an adversary out there, someone who always defeated them, always triumphed, it gave them ambition. It forced those races who might otherwise have stayed on their miserable homeworlds, picking fights with one another until they annihilated themselves, to find better technology, better weapons, and to set their sights on the stars, to find and destroy that enemy.

Whatever happened in this war, the Valeyard thought, there is no question as to who was guilty.

He kicked the dust and dead weeds from a long piece of fallen stone and read the inscription. _Resurgam_ , it said. _I will rise again._ He gave a slight sneer and was about to head off, knowing that the building had a crypt, and therefore somewhere underground where things might be hidden, when a flash of movement caught his eye. Something had dashed past one of the open side doors. The Valeyard hurried to the door and came out onto the side of a hill, into the mist and drizzle, and scanned the forest.

There was no sign of any of the guards, but a shape flitted down the line of the ancient street and disappeared into the trees. The Valeyard ran after it, listening for the sound of thrashing in the undergrowth above the tattoo of the rain against the leaves.

A few feet ahead, a figure in a dark cloak and cowl sprinted through the trees. He was sure it wasn’t one of their team. The Valeyard stood for a while, trying to work out what was going on. Perhaps it was one of the human survivors, but they should still be hiding in their underground settlements in this time period. He had never actually expected to find the Andromedans. Perhaps his memory was faulty. It was taking more time than he’d imagined to get used to this new form and now and then he felt a stray idea that evidently came from the Time Lord, Dolyn, invading his own ideas and purpose. He drew the staser weapon he’d taken as a precaution in case any local fauna had survived the Magnetron and carried on up the hill.

The figure veered off the line of the old street and headed north through the forest. The Valeyard climbed the hill after him, but by the time he reached the spot where the figure had disappeared, there was no sign of anyone.

‘Whoever you are,’ he called out, ‘there is no possibility of your escape. Your planet has been impounded by the High Council of Gallifrey. We know who you are. Surrender now and we may consider leniency.’

He waited, not actually expecting an answer, but the trick worked. Ahead, a twig snapped and gave him a direction to head in. He started off again, slowly this time, listening for movement. The trees clawed at him as if trying to hold him back but he pushed through, then came to a clearing and paused. The gilded statue of a woman, about nine feet tall, lay on its side. Her arms were outstretched on either side of her but one hand was embedded in the dirt beneath her. The other held a set of scales. She had once topped a building here, the Valeyard remembered, though there was no trace of it now. In front of the statue was the robed figure. It was impossible to make out any features beneath the cowl, but the Valeyard had the impression he was male, tall and slim, hands clasped calmly in front of him.

The Valeyard took aim. ‘Identify yourself.’

For a moment the figure did nothing. Then he raised one hand with ominous slowness and pointed to a spot on the ground between them. Without lowering his gun, the Valeyard edged a little closer and risked a look down at the place the figure indicated. A slab of Portland stone stuck out of the dirt like a bone poking through a wound, and on it was a small, bronze disk. The Valeyard took another step nearer to be sure he had seen the thing correctly. It was a Time Lord confession dial.

‘So, you’re one of Alzath’s comrades then,’ he said. The figure didn’t reply, but continued to point towards the confession dial.

‘I must say,’ the Valeyard continued, ‘your gall in coming here is somewhat impressive. But you understand, we know what you have been doing. We know why you have been doing it. And we are here to stop you.’

The figure moved its outstretched arm slightly as if to re-emphasise its point.

‘You think confessing now will save you?’ asked the Valeyard. The thought occurred to him, though, that if the Doctor was the ringleader of this operation, perhaps that’s what was in the confession. Still, if that dial was not intended for him specifically, it would send a jolt of energy through his body as soon as he touched it, painful and above all distracting, perhaps enough of a distraction to allow the figure to escape. Yes, the Valeyard thought, that was more likely to be the figure’s plan.

‘You must think me very stupid,’ he said. ‘A confession dial can only be opened by the intended recipient and you had no idea I was coming here.’

The figure remained as immobile as the statue of Justice behind him.

So long as he didn’t touch it directly, the Valeyard thought, it couldn’t harm him. He grabbed a handful of his outer robe and wound it around his hand, before he crouched on his haunches, never taking his eyes or his gun off the figure.

‘No matter what you do,’ he said, ‘you will fail. This war of yours will never happen. It will never be allowed to happen. Even if I stand alone, I will make sure of that.’

The Valeyard scooped up the dial, keeping the swathes of fabric between him and its surface. Despite his precautions he felt a jolt but not a painful one. It was more like something tugging on his robes at his back. 

The Valeyard kept his gun aimed at his target but risked a look over his shoulder. A burst of light blinded him, as if a doorway had opened and allowed the unfiltered heat of a sun to blaze through. He stumbled, lost his balance for a moment and struggled to stay on his feet. He expected the figure to have fled but when he looked up, the man in the robes was still there, watching him. The force pulling him towards the light gathered strength. The Valeyard felt his feet slip on the dead leaves as he was drawn towards the it. There was nothing to grab hold of, nothing to stop him falling into that blaze.

‘Goodbye, Valeyard,’ said the figure. ‘Though I’m sure we’ll meet again.’

The Valeyard knew that voice. It was…but before he could think clearly about it, he was falling. The forest vanished and he was hurtling towards an ocean. Before he hit the water and passed out, he caught a glimpse of a castle, and was sure that parts of it were moving.


	2. The Planet of a Thousand Deaths

The Planet of A Thousand Deaths

Bill Potts fought urge to punch something as she headed across the university quadrangle, head low against a light rain that, although just a drizzle, was as sharp as needles with the cold. Her head reeled with a conflicting mix of rage and hurt and indignance. Where exactly did they get off? Stuck up little…

She’d gone into the main building to hand in an essay to the student services office. All fine, in on time and she was actually quite happy with what she’d written. Course the Doctor would still find something wrong. He always did, but he was never critical for the sake of just putting her down, and he wasn’t scared of saying when she did something right either. As she’d been leaving the office, though, and checking her phone for messages, a couple of the other students from her course wandered by. She knew their faces but not their names. They were always in the Doctor’s lectures, usually sniggering and whispering to each other, taking the mick out of him like they were anything special.

She thought from the way they went on together that they were boyfriend and girlfriend. She’d heard them one time after lectures loudly proclaiming how late they’d stayed up drinking and just cribbed their papers from one of those online sites (which probably wasn’t true since the uni had software now to check for that sort of thing), and she’d thought to herself how, if they were a couple, they were really suited to each other. But she’d never really bothered with them, or thought they’d had any reason to notice her.

But as she’d stood there in the foyer outside the office, oblivious to the world around her, their voices cut through the general fog of conversation.

‘She’s not even a student. Didn’t she used to work in the canteen?’

It was the girl. Something froze inside Bill’s heart. She made herself stay still and not turn around. Why give them the satisfaction of reacting?

‘Suppose it’s one way to get a degree if you can’t afford the tuition fees,’ said the boy. ‘Most people try for a scholarship.’

‘Yeah but then you actually have to be good at stuff to get one of those. Shagging the tutor’s way easier.’

‘Well, she can’t be that good,’ said the boy. ‘He still makes her turn in essays!’

Fury rose inside her. She spun around to confront the two of them but was just in time to see them heading out the door. Bill wanted to scream. There were a few other students in the foyer and for a moment she was sure they’d all be staring at her, smirking, but after a moment she realised no one was even looking at her. The pair hadn’t been talking to anyone else. They just wanted her to hear it.

That’s how they get their kicks, she told herself as she headed away through the maze of university buildings. People like them were just trolls. Their own lives are probably so screwed up that all they can do is try to deflect their misery onto other people. That made logical sense to her but didn’t stop her wanting to beat the living daylights out of them. For a while she’d actually looked for them, hoping to catch up and tell them exactly what she thought, but they’d disappeared into the crowd. What would be the point anyway? If she shouted and screamed at them, they’d only laugh, call her mental or something. People like that didn’t care.

Sometimes she thought it might be easier to be like that, not to be bothered about what other people thought or what other people felt. She worried too much that what she did would hurt someone. She second guessed stuff all the time because she didn’t want her actions to harm anyone else. Those sorts of people just did whatever they wanted.

But then, she thought as she reached the Doctor’s office, would I really want to be one of those people? Could I live with myself if I was? Annoying though it was to be the nice one, the one who did the right thing, and usually lost out because of it, she would far rather have that on her conscience. The Doctor had said something like that once. _Goodness is not goodness that seeks reward. Good is good in the final hour, in the deepest pit, without hope, without witness, without reward. Virtue is only virtue in extremis._ Still, she thought, virtue in extremis never felt as satisfying in theory as punching someone hard in the mouth.

The Doctor wasn’t in his office. His ship, the TARDIS, was in its usual corner, still pretending to be a 1960s police box, but she tried the door and it was locked. She knocked, waited, and eventually concluded that he wasn’t in. At least if the TARDIS was here, he was still on Earth. That gave her a fair idea where he might be skulking about.

Why should she be bothered anyway? Bill’s still-furious inner voice kept asking the question as she made her way to the outbuilding the Doctor hung about in. So what if they thought she’d slept her way into the course? She knew it wasn’t true. She knew the Doctor had taken her on and offered to be her tutor because he saw something in her. He believed in her.

She also knew, while the rest of them were totally oblivious, that the Doctor wasn’t even human. He was an alien, a Time Lord. She wasn’t a hundred percent sure on the details but whatever he was, he travelled in time and space and he was amazing. Scary sometimes, but amazing. Since she’d met him she’d seen river monsters in Victorian London, robots in the far future on an alien world, been to Mars and Roman Scotland and planets no one on Earth had even heard of yet. And he had only let her be part of all that, part of his secret, because he liked her and he trusted her. So screw them. What did they know?

She went down to the cellar of the building and at once knew she’d been right to try there. The door was protected by some kind of high-tech mechanism that only allowed the Doctor’s friends to enter, but it also acted as a camouflage for what was hidden down there, stopping any sound from leaking out. As soon as she stepped through, she heard music. One of those piano pieces she was sure she should know the name of, but all she could think was that Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck had played in it _Who Framed Roger Rabbit._

This cellar was where the Doctor kept his other big secret, the Vault. It was a box made out of some kind of metal, covered in symbols and markings she didn’t understand but that looked both ancient and futuristic all at once. For a long time, he hadn’t been willing to let her know what was inside, but with everything that had happened to them, Bill had managed to find out. The Vault was a prison. At first she’d worried about the Doctor keeping someone locked up, but she knew a little more about the prisoner now and had even met her a couple of times, and had to admit that maybe prison was the best place for her. As she drew nearer she saw that the Vault door was ajar. The piano was louder now, not only because she was closer but because they’d reached one of the really banging parts of the piece, but she could make out voices underneath it.

‘You could consider it an exercise in trust,’ she heard the Doctor say.

Bill slipped in through the open door and took in the scene before her. A grand piano sat on a dais in the centre, inside a glass-walled enclosure. The Doctor was at the keys, sharing the stool with his prisoner, the woman who called herself Missy and who, apparently, was from the same planet as the Doctor. Only, she seemed to have left her charm back on that planet, Bill thought. They played the piece as a duet, their backs to the door and Bill, and to Nardole, the Doctor’s other friend, whom Bill found slumped in a leather armchair, scowling.

‘I fixed your TARDIS,’ Missy said, having to shout over the chords and glissandos, ‘which, I might add, meant saving you and your little friends from almost certain and painful death. What else do you want me to do?’

‘I’m not talking about my trusting you,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’m talking about your returning the favour.’

Missy gave a derisive laugh.

‘What’s going on?’ Bill asked Nardole. ‘What are they doing?’

‘Arguing, mainly,’ replied Nardole with a sigh.

‘You can’t just leave it lying around out there,’ the Doctor went on.

With a groan, Missy gave the piano keys a final thump and got up. She turned, looking ready to storm off in a huff, but she spotted Bill and wrinkled her nose with unconcealed disgust.

‘Oh, brilliant,’ she said. ‘Now you’ve attracted the local wildlife.’

The Doctor stopped playing and glanced over his shoulder. ‘Missy, where is it?’

‘What do you want it for anyway? What, if I’m good, I get to take it down the shops for an hour?’

‘Hardly.’

‘Where’s what?’ asked Bill.

‘Mummy and daddy are having a grown up discussion, dear,’ Missy snapped. ‘Go back to your room and play with something toxic.’

Missy wandered around the piano, hands on hips, prowling back and forth. She reminded Bill of a tiger she’d seen at London Zoo, going slowly insane inside its pen and daring anybody looking through the glass to come and have a go.

‘It’ll die if it’s left alone,’ said the Doctor. ‘You know that.’

‘Let it die,’ Missy replied. ‘It’s no use to me.’ Even Bill heard the lie in her voice this time, and noticed how Missy had kept her back to them as she’d spoken.

‘Let what die?’ Bill asked.

‘Her TARDIS,’ the Doctor told her.

‘You’ve got a TARDIS?’

Missy turned on her sharply. ‘What, you think he’s the only one who can hot wire a time capsule? I at least had the sense to steal one that works.’

‘So, where’s yours then?’ Bill asked.

‘That’s what we’re trying to establish,’ said the Doctor.

They all watched Missy for a while as she continued to pace. Then she let out a loud, exasperated growl.

‘Fine, whatever, it’s on Tahotra. I left it on Tahotra.’

‘Tahotra,’ said Nardole, sitting up straighter in his chair, ‘as in ‘the planet of a thousand deaths’?’

‘Did anyone really expect it to be a place full of kittens and rainbows?’ Bill asked, throwing Missy what she hoped was a decently powerful glare.

***

The TARDIS engines groaned as they began their landing, while the Doctor scurried around the panels on the console, either engrossed in some sort of calculation, or just pretending to be so he could ignore the looks of concern all around him. Nardole stood by the console room railing, arms folded, brow furrowed. Bill knew she was frowning too, because everything inside her was screaming that this was a bad idea and she could never manage to keep something as strong as that out of her facial expressions. On the upper level, leaning on the rail, even Missy looked unhappy, perhaps even a little bit scared, Bill thought, though every time Missy caught her staring, that hint of vulnerability was quickly masked behind the customary sneer.

‘Tahotra,’ the Doctor said, heading to one of the hexagonal panels in the walls, which he opened to reveal a shallow cabinet behind. He rummaged inside then returned with several golden objects in his hands, but Bill couldn’t make out what they were. ‘Seventh Age of the Heryan Ergonarchy, the City of Valiant Toil. I think it’s a Tuesday. You do remember where you parked?’

Missy leaned forward and propped her chin on her hand. ‘Well, my chameleon circuit actually works, so it’s not as easy as just looking for the big, stupid-looking blue box, but…’

‘Are we all just going to ignore the fact that this Tahotra?’ Nardole interrupted. ‘Population, seven billion extremely xenophobic insectoids, listed in every galactic guidebook as ‘probably avoid’ due to the fact that aliens, i.e. anything not an extremely xenophobic insectoid, are killed on sight for the crime of being an alien? And killed in one of, as the name suggests, over a thousand ingenious ways the natives have developed over the millennia for just that purpose?’

‘Are you quite finished?’ the Doctor asked in a quiet voice.

Nardole shifted slightly, but nodded.

In one quick flash of movement, the Doctor took the golden objects he’d pulled from the cabinet and tossed one to each of them. Bill barely caught hers before it smacked her in the face, then she turned it over in her hands, trying to figure out what it was. It was almond shaped, but only about a centimetre thick, with a smooth, metallic surface and some kind of raised symbols or buttons on one side, and a clasp on the back as if it was meant to hook onto a belt or something.

‘Perception filter,’ the Doctor announced. ‘With a camouflage element built in, so the observer doesn’t just ignore you, they think they’ve seen whatever you programme it to tell them they’ve seen. Borrowed a couple from the Saturnynians and made a few adjustments.’

He clipped on of the devices onto the lapel of his coat then looked around at them as if he expected applause. For a moment, as Bill stared at him, he seemed to shimmer in and out of existence. She had an impression of a much larger creature, draped in red robes, but it was gone in a blink and the Doctor was back.

‘You don’t look any different,’ Bill said.

The Doctor looked crestfallen. ‘Telepathic circuits in here can sometimes interfere. Besides, you know I’m using it so you can see through the illusion more easily. Now, I’m giving you those as a precaution. You two are going to stay here.’

‘We’re what?’ Bill demanded.

‘Eh?’ Nardole asked at the same time.

‘When we find Missy’s TARDIS, assuming it’s here…’

‘It’s here,’ Missy called down, sounding bored with the whole thing.

‘When we find it,’ the Doctor continued, ‘we’ll need to set up a tether between the two ships, basically tow her TARDIS back to Earth using mine. Missy and I will set up the protocol at one end and it’ll send a sync request through here. All you two have to do is accept the request to tether when it comes through, then I’ve programmed in the co-ordinates to take us all back home, so you just hit the button. Easy.’

‘But why…’ Bill began, but then Missy came down from the upper level, taking deliberately heavy, thumping footsteps to draw the attention back to her.

‘Because he doesn’t want to leave me in charge of one of his pets,’ she said. ‘Just in case I accidentally disintegrate you or something. He wants to keep an eye on me. It’s a fox and chicken and grain thing, only with two moronic humans and a homicidal Time Lady.’

‘I don’t expect we’ll be too long,’ the Doctor said. He regarded Missy coolly, and though she continued to saunter across the console room, Bill thought she saw the bravado fade slightly from the other woman’s pale blue eyes, just for a second.

‘Only come after us if there’s no other choice,’ the Doctor went on. ‘Nardole’s right. This planet didn’t get its nickname out of nowhere.’

He and Missy left the TARDIS, stepping through the doors into a desert city of soft, mud buildings, bathed in pinkish sunlight. As soon as the two of them left the ship, the air seemed to shimmer and they disappeared. In their place stood two large creatures, wrapped in crimson fabric. Long, feathered antennae poked out beneath their hoods, but as Bill watched them wander off, she began to see through the illusion. After a moment they turned a corner and were gone. Bill closed the doors and returned to the console, to find Nardole frowning at her. She didn’t need to ask him what was wrong. She was thinking the same thing. Every instinct she had told her this was a really bad idea.

***

The City of Valiant Toil, the Doctor discovered after wandering its labyrinthine streets for almost an hour, was more of a hive, eaten into the desert stone by centuries of Tahotrans gnawing away with their razor-sharp mandibles. The species resembled a cross between a praying mantis and a cockroach, only each one stood upright and walked on only four of their eight limbs. The other two pairs were used to manipulate objects the way humans used arms, and the foremost pair were also equipped with a set of large claws that, according to rumour, could crush a human skull like a blueberry. They had two sets of wings, kept beneath a thick crimson carapace and rarely used, practically vestigial, although supposedly some Tahotrans were still able to fly. None here in the city, though, by the looks of it. Everyone here stuck to the streets, scuttling back and forth with a great sense of purpose and activity. Thankfully none of them paid any attention to the two intruders.

He’d never visited this planet, having heard of its universal fear and hatred of anything alien, and he wasn’t so keen to explore as he would normally have been. He had a job to do and it was best to get it over with. Still, he thought, now that he had the perception filters and they actually, surprisingly, seemed to work, it might be fun to come back one day and have a proper look at the place.

The social structure alone was fascinating, an insect hive that was slowly breaking down to resemble a far more mammalian, even human system. The Tahotrans had carved entire mountains thanks to their co-operation and rigid hierarchy, but over the millennia, the larvae had begun to evolve a sense of self and lost their connection to the others. The hive mind of Tahotra that had created this city was long gone. According to the TARDIS database, only the very old amongst these people still sensed the thoughts of those around them, which was lucky for the Doctor and Missy, as otherwise their disguises would have been useless. Maybe he would come back and spend a few weeks here, just observing. Though knowing his track record, the Doctor thought, there’d be an invasion and he’d be caught right in the middle of it, revealed as an imposter and worse, an alien himself and condemned to death, only escaping by his not-insubstantial genius and sharp wits. Maybe not such a good idea then.

They came to an outcrop of pink granite that glittered in the light of the twin suns, and which had been intricately carved so that a channel ran through it, lined on both sides with decorated columns. Each column was covered in representations of plants and other insect life and images of presumably famous Tahotrans, all in bas-relief. Between the columns, tall arches had been cut into the rock. The insects had burrowed deep into the stone, possibly deep into the earth. He’d read that some of the grander Tahotran structures spiralled down through miles of the planet’s crust and were all as beautifully decorated inside as they were on the exterior. This had to be some kind of official or religious building, the Doctor decided. The other dwellings they’d passed were more like holes in a termite mound. This was art.

‘The Avenue of the Adamantine Chrysalis,’ Missy said, reading from a series of scratches on the wall of the ornate building, which the TARDIS thankfully translated into something understandable as the Doctor looked up at it. ‘Just round this corner.’

‘You’ve said that for the last eighteen corners,’ the Doctor reminded her.

‘It’s a while since I was here,’ Missy protested. ‘You know, been a bit busy, being executed. And then imprisoned. And then bored.’

‘I got you a piano.’

‘I wanted a pony.’

They went down the side of the building into a narrow lane. At the far end was an alcove, in which stood a carving of a Tahotran, busily tearing apart the body of an unfortunate bipedal creature as if it were a piece of bread. A variety of other skulls from many different alien species lay at its feet. Beside it was a merchant’s stall, selling smaller versions of the statue and small plaques showing carved landscapes, probably places of interest. The Doctor supposed tourists were welcome in the City of Valiant Toil, just so long as they weren’t aliens.

Missy stood in front of the statue, staring up at it. Now the Doctor was near enough, he could see that it was flanked by two more of the delicately carved columns and that there was a recess behind it, perhaps six feet squared. Just large enough for a TARDIS, although there wasn’t one. The space was empty.

‘This is a dead end, Missy,’ the Doctor said. ‘No more corners. Where is it?’

‘It was there,’ she insisted, heading into the recess. She walked around it a few times, eyes wide and furious. ‘I left it right there.’

The Doctor folded his arms. ‘Missy, I am really not…’

‘I am not lying,’ she growled. ‘I parked it behind the statue of the brutal ritual murder. It was there.’

‘Well, I hate to state the obvious, but it isn’t there now.’

Missy emerged from the recess and glowered at the city around her, finally focusing on the merchant at his stall. ‘That overgrown woodlouse was there back then. You!’

Before the Doctor could stop her, she marched over to the stall.

‘That statue over there,’ she began.

The merchant raised his head and cocked it to one side, clicked his mandibles and put down the stone plaque he’d been polishing.

‘Yeah,’ he said, in a voice the TARDIS translated as surprisingly cheerful and surprisingly, Cockney, ‘the Great Korontana, God of the Underworld, carved by the Conglomerate of Unceasing Oscillation in the Fourth Age of…’

‘Yeah, I’ve read the guidebook,’ Missy interrupted. ‘What I want is…’

‘Where you from? The Assigns of Tapaka? You want to take a bit of Korontana home with you? I’ve got excellent reproductions, all genuine artisanal craftsmanship, carved by my very own jaws, and very cheap…’

‘I’d rather take off the perception filter I’m wearing, let you see I’m actually an alien and then suffer all one thousand of your planet’s supposed collection of deaths than hear any more about this statue.’

‘Missy…’ The Doctor came to her side and took her arm, but she shook him off.

The merchant, meanwhile, regarded her curiously. ‘Never could get the hang of that Tapakan sense of humour. Must be a northern thing. How about a view of the Great Hive of Queen Handresy-Tselatra, bargain price at…’

‘There was something behind that statue,’ Missy interrupted. ‘A stone column…’

‘Thought you said your chameleon circuit worked?’ the Doctor asked in a low voice.

‘It does. I just… I just like that shape.’

‘Oh yeah, that thing,’ said the merchant. ‘Did a hell of a lot of damage getting that out.’

‘Who did?’ Missy asked.

‘Oh, didn’t you hear about that in Tapaka? The aliens?’

Missy straightened and threw the Doctor a wary look.

‘What aliens?’ he asked.

‘Oh, it was like something from a play. Honestly, I was talking to my missus about it just the other day. Ship appeared over the city one morning out of nowhere, great big thing. Sent down a shuttle right to the Avenue of the Adamantine Chrysalis, right down here. Ramp comes down, out come all these aliens. I mean, I’d never seen one of ‘em for real before. An alien I mean. You hear the stories but it just doesn’t prepare you for how hideous they are. And these ones – I read in the news the next day the government thought they were called ‘humans’ – I mean, no carapace, only four legs and two eyes each, only walking on two of the legs, like how is that even possible? Most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in my life. You’d think they’d fall over all the time…’

‘What did these aliens do?’ Missy interrupted. The Doctor could see the strain on her face and was actually slightly proud. She was really trying hard not to kill him.

‘Went in there,’ said the merchant, pointing with a claw towards the recess, ‘said something about how that column thingy you’re on about was really ‘alien technology’. Lunatics, had to be. Next you know, they’re pulling some sort of claw thing on a wire out their ship, dragged it down the lane, stuck it on the column and started pulling it up the ramp. Brought down half the pillar on the right hand side. Seven hundred years old that was, not that you’d expect an alien to appreciate that sort of thing. The council done a great job though. Got it repaired in under a week. Crowdfunding campaign.’

‘What happened to the aliens?’ the Doctor asked.

The merchant made a wheezing sound that might have been a sigh. ‘Escaped. The City Guard came but they couldn’t get past the alien ship, you see. It were blocking the entrance to the lane. Couple of them tried to get up on the walls, but the aliens shot at them with these laser guns. They were shouting and stuff was exploding. Total chaos. But the aliens just blasted away and kept on hauling the thing into the ship. Then they flew off. Council’s talking about getting some kind of weaponry installed so if any more of ‘em try, they can blow ‘em out the sky.’

Missy let out a growl and turned away.

‘You said they were human?’ the Doctor asked, keeping an eye on Missy at the same time, though she’d only gone back to the statue and was prowling about in front of it like an aggravated cat. ‘You didn’t happen to hear anything more? What planet they were from? What they called themselves?’

‘Oh, I heard what one of them called himself,’ said the merchant. ‘Shouted it at the City Guard like they were supposed to have heard of him.’

The Doctor waited. Missy had drifted back to his side and was now glaring at the merchant again, but the Tahotran himself had gone back to polishing his stone plaques.

‘Well?’ Missy said. ‘For God’s sake, who did he say he was?’


	3. Graverobbers

Graverobbers

Milar Santiago paced the length of the converted ship’s hold, hands in the pockets of her custom-made suit, the click of her heels echoing. The place looked like a museum, artefacts on pedestals and behind glass cases, picked out by bright spotlights that left the rest of the hold in near-complete darkness. Milar approved of the look. There was nothing here to suggest this was a saleroom, no fawning assistants breathing down her neck or price tags ruining the elegance of the goods. The old adage was true: if you had to ask the price, you couldn’t afford it. It always made her smile to know she never had to ask.

She paused to look at the shell of a Dalek, scarred and dented from battle. It sent a pleasant shiver down her spine. These things were awesome in the true sense of the word, even in death. Just the sight of it produced an instinctive terror and she had to fight the urge to shy away from it.

‘Ms Santiago,’ said a voice behind her. She turned and found a scruffy looking man in cheap, crumpled clothes coming towards her. He walked with an arrogant swagger and looked at her with hungry, beady little eyes that made her instantly dislike him.

She raised an expensively sculpted eyebrow. ‘Yes?’

‘I was asked to see if there was anything you needed.’

You’d think with the money that had to come through these sales, the boss would be able to afford some proper staff, Milar thought.

‘What I need,’ she said, ‘is to speak to your employer. Any chance that might be arranged some time this century?’

‘He’s very busy, Ms Santiago,’ said the thug.

‘So am I. My family is responsible for running nine planets in the Third Zone. I don’t have the time to wait around here until your captain can be bothered to talk. Or doesn’t he want my money?’

‘I’ll pass that on,’ said the lackey, before sloping off. Milar was almost certain he was sniggering as he left. Maybe she’d tell the authorities about this wreck of a ship once her business here was complete. She doubted whether these people paid tax, or paid too much attention to the Third Zoner import and export regulations. Having to deal with these sorts made her feel physically ill, but it was a necessary evil. If they truly possessed what they’d advertised on the dark net, then she had to buy it.

She walked slowly down the rows of exhibits until she came to the object that had piqued her interest. She checked the message that had popped up on her secure, and very secret mail server just to confirm she had the right item number, but yes, this was it. At a casual glance, it appeared to be a stone column, but this piece was not kept behind glass, and Milar was able to reach out and lay her palm against the surface. It felt like stone, roughened by centuries of weather, but there was a vibration too, a hum of power running through it that said it was so much more than just a lump of stone.

She smiled and returned to the open space amongst the displays, re-reading the message to be sure she hadn’t missed anything that might trip her up in the sales negotiations.

_Dear loyal customer_ , it read. _You are receiving this message because you subscribed to new item notifications. Just in – genuine Gallifreyan time capsule, complete, minimal war damage, possibly still in working order. Recovered after it was abandoned, this one hundred percent bona fide capsule is practically unique. In all our years of sales, we have never seen another like it._

The message went on to give the dimensions – Milar supposed these were only the outer dimensions, as legend said Time Lord capsules were much larger inside.

_This item will be auctioned at our upcoming sale on board the Nosferatu II, however the management are willing to consider any sensible offer that reflects the rarity and quality of this item. See our other items for sale…_

She clicked off the display on her wrist unit when she heard the whoosh of the hold doors opening behind her. Turning, she watched as three men entered, two walking with the same insolent swagger as the lackey who’d just left, the third a little more upright. When they came into the light, she saw that this one, a man perhaps in his sixties, though with the anti-ageing tech they had nowadays it was impossible to tell, was stout on the verge of being overweight. His hair was salt and pepper and shaved into very old fashioned broken sideburns that ran into his short grey beard.

That sort of style, Milar thought, had gone out twenty years ago, and even then it had only really been favoured by the ‘entrepreneurial classes’, the dodgy dealers and grubbers who drifted from planet to planet in the Third Zone, and who would sell space itself if they thought they had a buyer. His suit, too, was expensive but gaudy. The cut was at least a decade out of date and the forest green looked ghastly with his complexion. It had also been made for a much thinner man, she thought, looking at the way his shirt strained over his paunch.

Still, she thought, switching on her most courteous and charming smile, something that only came with proper wealth and proper breeding, this is the odious little creep I have to deal with if I want my capsule.

‘Ms Santiago?’ asked the man.

Milar offered her hand, radiating warmth on the outside whilst her skin crawled at his touch. ‘I am indeed.’

The man smiled back. It was the sort of smile a reptile might give right before it ate a fly.

‘Sabalom Glitz,’ he introduced himself. ‘Glad to make your acquaintance.’

***

‘Who is he?’ Bill asked.

She looked over the Doctor’s shoulder at the monitor on the TARDIS console, where he’d frozen a video to show a still image of a stout, grey haired man in a ridiculous red satin suit.

The Doctor swept around the console, checking the controls as he went. ‘Old friend,’ he said, then glanced at Missy. ‘Well, more her old friend I suppose.’

‘Mine?’ Missy scowled.

‘Yes, well, you seemed very pally together.’

‘I’ve never seen that greasy looking bag of hardened arteries before in my life.’

For a while the two of them just stared at each other, the Doctor studying Missy as if looking for some kind of joke while she glared back as if he’d lost his mind. Bill shook her head, pushed past the two of them, and switched off the monitor screen.

‘Sabalom Glitz,’ said Nardole. ‘You don’t want to do business with him, Doctor. I did a job for him back on Derulea Seven. He still hasn’t paid me.’

‘Why do I get the feeling I’d be safer not knowing about that?’ asked the Doctor.

‘But who is he?’ Bill went on. ‘Why’s he collecting Time Lord stuff?’

‘Time War stuff,’ Missy corrected. ‘He’s got a few bits of Dalek for sale too. Extortionate prices though. I could get you one of those for half that.’

The Doctor gave her a sour look then turned the monitor back on. It showed the same display Missy must’ve been studying, a list of various items up for sale. Bill recognised a Dalek in the middle of it all, but not much else.

‘Glitz is a trader. Well, a criminal to be honest. From the planet Salostopus in the Third Zone of Andromeda. We’ve met a few times. Up until this point in the timeline I’d’ve said he was fairly harmless but there are a lot of things advertised for sale here that shouldn’t be allowed into the wrong hands.’

‘Yes, my TARDIS being one of them,’ said Missy. ‘So are we any nearer to finding the disgusting little man?’

As if she’d been waiting for a cue, the TARDIS engines clunked and stopped. The Doctor flicked a few more switches and brought up a picture on the screen that Bill assumed was the view outside, a dark, industrial-looking space with metal walls and thick girders across the ceiling.

‘We’re on board Glitz’s ship,’ the Doctor said. ‘Judging by the power signatures, all the technology he’s squirrelled away is in this hold. Should be a simple matter of finding the TARDIS and engaging the tether protocol. Assuming the TARDIS is actually here this time.’

Missy rolled her eyes then sloped off towards the door. The Doctor gave the console one last check then headed after her, but Bill intercepted him.

‘Hang on, don’t you think me and Nardole should take this one?’

The Doctor’s brow furrowed. ‘Why?’

‘You know, for someone really clever you can be seriously thick at times,’ Bill said. He still looked blank and she sighed.

‘This bloke is selling anything he can get his hands on to do with the Time War, right?’

‘So?’ asked Missy.

‘So,’ Bill said slowly, ‘last of the Time Lords?’

‘Plus one,’ added Nardole.

‘How much d’you think he’d get for you two on his space-eBay?’

‘Especially since…’ Nardole shifted his weight.

‘Since what?’ asked the Doctor with an air of indignance.

‘Well,’ said Nardole. ‘Time Lord. Time Lady. Breeding pair.’

‘Don’t be so disgusting,’ Missy replied, grimacing. She pushed past the Doctor and strode out.

‘It’ll be fine,’ the Doctor said. ‘Perception filters’ll work here too. Just stay here and wait for the request signal. Same plan, slightly different location, that’s all.’

‘Just be careful,’ Bill said, but she didn’t think he heard her. Or perhaps he just wasn’t listening.

***

A long time and a couple of lifetimes ago, the Doctor had landed in an underground vault full of alien artefacts, all collected by some egomaniacal human who saw everything as an investment or a symbol of his power. The Doctor felt the same disgust as he walked through the hold of the Nosferatu II as he had seeing the items in Van Statten’s collection.

‘Ooh, they’ve got a type four ion cannon,’ Missy announced, veering over to one of the cabinets.

‘This is obscene,’ replied the Doctor.

‘It’s only stuff. Not like friend here’s going to miss it.’ She kicked the base of one of the cabinets. The sad-looking shell of the Dalek inside didn’t move.

The Doctor paused by a glass case. Inside it was a fragment of Gallifreyan armour, streaked with laser burns.

‘These are all part of a grave, a war grave that spans the length and breadth of the universe. They’re not collectibles to sit on someone’s mantelpiece.’

‘You only say that because they’re ours,’ Missy said in a low, frighteningly even tone. ‘Fine if it’s some Egyptian mummy or a Rutan funerary hoard. Everything’s just an object to somebody else. That’s why it doesn’t pay to be sentimental.’

She wandered off again, looking idly at the displays. She was right, in a way, the Doctor thought. He’d spent hours in museums all across the universe. He’d even been married to an archaeologist once. But it still felt different to see his own species displayed as a curiosity. Perhaps there was still a bit of guilt mixed in with his outrage as well. Sure enough, he knew now that Gallifrey hadn’t completely fallen as he’d once thought, but there were still billions of graves out there, all thanks to the Time War. Millions of planets plucked out of existence in a heartbeat. That wasn’t something to collect memorabilia about. He imagined wealthy Andromedan businessmen sitting in their custom-built palaces on their custom-terraformed planets, revelling in bloodshed that was only a story to them. Maybe there were already re-enactors out there. The thought made him nauseous.

He had to admit, however, that Glitz had amassed an impressive collection. There were Dalek relics, broken weapons, shattered Time Lord message cubes, dozens of pieces from all throughout space and time. He saw the names of so many battlegrounds, he had to struggle to remember which ones he’d been to, and which was which, although a few of the particularly bad ones stood out. They must have put a great deal of work into scouring the universe for all these bits and pieces of the dead.

He paused and shook his head as he found a small cabinet, where a yellowed skull say on a black velvet cushion. There was a deep gash in the cranium where an energy weapon had hit it.

‘Obscene,’ he said again, and laid a hand on the glass. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Who would want to buy a confession dial?’ Missy called over, breaking the spell. ‘What use is it to a human? Not as if they can open it. Best they can hope for is slip it to a friend and laugh when he gets a shock.’

‘I doubt they even know what it is,’ the Doctor said. ‘Half these things are mislabelled.’

‘Hm. If they did know what it was, they could probably get double what they’re asking for it.’

‘Why?’

He glanced over at her and found her leaning on a low, long cabinet where, presumably, she’d found the dial. Missy smirked.

‘Your name scratched on the surface? Surely anything with ‘The Doctor’ on it sells for more?’

‘Are you admitting I’m important?’

‘I’m admitting that you like to show off to these ridiculous little humans and they’re stupid enough to be impressed by it.’

The Doctor was about to move on but he finally registered what Missy had said. ‘What do you mean it’s got my name on it?’

He went over to the cabinet. Missy gestured to the object then wandered off. The Doctor leaned on the glass as she had been doing. It was a confession dial, a little scuffed and chipped as if it was very old. Someone had indeed gouged out his name across the surface, obliterating the existing engraving. More concerning, it was his real name.

‘Someone wants my attention,’ he muttered, and took out his sonic glasses. It took only a few seconds to unfasten the screws holding the glass top onto to the unit. He opened it and braced himself for a jolt as he picked up the dial. There was no shock. He felt the weight of it as he passed it from hand to hand. The dial just sat there, inert.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Either you’ve already been read and are no longer active or you’re intended for me. So…’

He began to twist the dial, the first of the movements needed to open it. He just had time to register the shriek of a laser blast, when something hit him on the shoulder so hard he flew a few feet before hitting the ground again so hard the air was knocked out of his lungs. The dial spat out a shower of sparks, spun out of his hand and skipped across the floor like a stone across water, disappearing beneath the cabinets. That was when the pain began.

The Doctor clutched at his right shoulder and was surprised to find it still attached to his body. It felt as if whatever hit him had torn him in half. He was bleeding, though, he saw that, and he could smell charred flesh. He tried to roll onto his side so he could get on his knees and try to stand but it hurt so badly that he nearly blacked out, so he just lay there for a moment, catching his breath. Footsteps clunked over the metal floor towards him. He raised his head as much as he was able and saw two pairs of heavy boots, on either side of a set of very expensive reptile-skin shoes. The three figures took a step closer and the Doctor was able to see their faces for the first time. Two heavy-browed, scarred louts he didn’t recognise and then in between them, in a hideous green suit, was Glitz himself.

‘Silent alarm, friend,’ Glitz said. ‘Nobody steals from Sabalom Glitz.’

The two lackeys sniggered and kept their weapons trained on the Doctor. Like he was going anywhere.

‘Scan him for weapons and do a quick check on which species he is,’ Glitz ordered. ‘I want to know which planet would be stupid enough to send their people here to try and rob me.’

‘I’m not working for anyone,’ the Doctor said.

‘Course, course. You might be freelance,’ Glitz replied. ‘Only in my experience they tend to have a bit more skill.’

‘Mr Glitz.’ The lackey returned with some sort of hand scanner. He showed Glitz the display.

‘That’s not possible,’ Glitz said, frowning.

‘It’s what the scan says.’ The lackey nodded towards the Doctor. ‘Two hearts, Mr Glitz.’

Glitz straightened. Even with half his body feeling as though it was on fire, the Doctor could still think clearly enough to guess what was on that screen.

‘I thought you said they was all dead,’ said the lackey.

‘I did, and they were. There’s only one Time Lord would be canny enough to escape the Time War. And only one who’d be stupid enough to try and break in here.’

The Doctor watched as the realisation spread over Glitz’s features.

‘Hello, Glitz, nice to see you again. Or it would be if you hadn’t just shot me.’

‘You,’ said Glitz dourly. ‘I know people who change their underwear less often than you change your face, Doctor.’

‘That I can believe.’

‘He’s a Time Lord?’ asked his lackey.

‘He is indeed, Rocca. And he very rarely travels alone. Chances are he’s got a little friend somewhere here. Find them.’

One of the henchmen, the one that wasn’t Rocca, nodded and left.

‘There’s no one else here,’ the Doctor said.

‘Then he won’t find anything, will he?’ Glitz retorted.

‘He’s gotta be worth a few grotsits, Mr Glitz,’ said Rocca. The Doctor saw the man’s otherwise dead eyes gleam with greed.

‘In my experience, he never brings in anything but trouble,’ said Glitz. ‘But you’re right, Rocca. I’ve got buyers who would happily cough up an organ or two for a chance to get their hands on you, Doctor. Andyou turn up the day before my auction. Just in time to be the star of the show. It must be fate.’

***

Missy heard the laser shot and ducked behind the nearest cabinet. Through the glass, she saw the Doctor fall and for one sweet moment she thought he might be dead, but then he let out a growl of pain and writhed about, clawing at his shoulder where the fabric of his coat and jumper had been shredded and the skin blackened by the blast. Three men crossed the hold, two of them with ridiculously large guns. Definitely a bit of compensation going on there.

While their attention was on the Doctor, she slipped into the shadows at the edge of the hold and followed the bulkhead, looking for a door. She would find somewhere to keep out of the way until things had calmed down, then, while they were interrogating the very useful decoy she’d brought along, she’d head back and hunt for her TARDIS in peace.

She froze at the sound of voices ahead and kept close to the wall, where the lights didn’t reach her. In a pool of light about five or six metres away, she saw a tall, blonde woman in a red suit and heels you could poke someone’s eye out with. The woman stood with her arms folded, watching as a group of the ship’s thugs hauled on the handle of an anti-grav trolley. As the trolley crept along into the light, Missy made out the silhouette of a stone column on it and cursed under her breath.

She would probably have to kill them now and that would set her back weeks. She’d made an effort to cut back on killing. She had tried really hard, and now these ridiculous humans were going to throw her right back to the starting point. The she pushed the thought away. The Doctor was probably dead, or near to it so she didn’t have to worry what he thought of her any more. She would have to make her own way off this spaceship and there was her escape route, on the back of that trolley. There was no one left to care if she was good or evil. What did he expect, that she’d actually go and rescue him?

Something cold and metallic pressed against the nape of her neck. She’d seen enough guns to know the muzzle of one when she felt it. She cursed again under her breath and raised her hands.

‘Turn around,’ said a voice behind her. The breath that came with it stank of rotting meat and sulphur. She complied with the order, and looked into the face of a creature that might have been human but was more likely still on its way through the evolutionary stages. He kept his gun on her and with his free hand tapped a comms bracelet.

‘Got her, Mr Glitz.’

‘Excellent work, Braga,’ replied this Glitz over the channel. ‘Take her to the holding cells.’

‘Right away, Mr Glitz.’

‘Right away, Mr Glitz,’ Missy mimicked. ‘If he told you to jump out an airlock, would you do it?’

‘No,’ said Braga the barely human. ‘But if he told me to throw you out one, I would. Move.’

‘You know the Doctor’s a Time Lord,’ she said. ‘I’m actually here to do a deal. I’ll let your boss have him for trade prices. A real, live Time Lord.’

‘That’s Mr Glitz’s business.’

‘Course it is,’ Missy said, dripping with sarcasm that probably soared over the oaf’s head.

She started to walk ahead of him but kept her pace deliberately slow and casual.

‘I said move,’ Braga shouted. He prodded her between the shoulder blades with his gun. ‘You’ve got to go join your friend in…’ He broke off with a short gurgle.

Missy turned, found him staring wildly at her, while a rivulet of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. He gargled again, more blood spilling over his chin, then his knees buckled and he toppled forward.

Missy frowned down at him, kicked him to check he was really dead, even though she recognised the sound of a man being stabbed in the lung. Braga had fallen face down and she could see now the handle of a knife sticking out.

She stooped to recover the weapon. It had a lovely ebony handle, very ergonomic, and a razor-sharp stiletto blade. She really wanted to steal it, but then she heard the killer step towards her and finally looked up. At first he stood in shadow. She could only make out a male silhouette, wearing what looked like a frock coat and knee length boots. Then he took another step and one of the red, working lights caught his face.

‘Well, well, well,’ he said. ‘Fancy meeting you here.’

He came closer and Missy recoiled. There had been a slight nudge at the back of her mind, a tiny bit of telepathic contact, enough to recognise one of her own kind but not enough to give her his name.

‘Do I know you?’ she asked, with as much bravado as she could muster.

The nearer the figure came, the more her nerves bristled. Something was very, very wrong with this Time Lord, if he really was a Time Lord. She still wasn’t entirely sure. He held out his hand and at first she thought he wanted to take hers, but then she realised he was waiting for his knife to be returned. She handed it over and snatched her hand away before the stranger could even brush against her. He smiled and bent low over the corpse of Glitz’s lackey, plucking a large pistol from the man’s holster. This he tucked into his own belt beneath his frock coat.

‘I should’ve thought so,’ he said. ‘We will meet, a long time ago. Decades ago relative to this time stream. You don’t remember?’

She shook her head. ‘I think I’d remember you.’

She hated the stranger at that moment. His movements were languid, relaxed, not at all threatening but her instincts were lit up like a fireworks display, telling her to run. She loathed that feeling. She loathed him for causing that reaction in her. She realised she’d been slowly backing away when she felt the thud as her back met the bulkhead. She also realised then that there was nowhere left to retreat. Whether he sensed her discomfort or not, the stranger continued towards her. He brushed a stray curl of hair behind her ear and she fought to remain still, not to flinch at his touch.

‘I remember your father’s lands,’ he said, caressing her cheek. ‘Pastures of red grass on Mount Perdition, and we would run, you and I.’

‘That’s not possible,’ she said, annoyed at how shrill and hoarse her voice came out, but she could feel her hearts thudding against her rib cage, her pulse so loud she almost feared the drumming had returned. ‘You can’t be him.’

The answer hit her and she turned cold. She knew the stories. She’d always found the idea that one day the Doctor could be turned to her way of thinking quite intriguing, but not now that she was face to face with his darker side incarnate. He was so wrong, and yet she didn’t know exactly how. Everything about him was against nature somehow and her body and mind were reacting to it, urging her to get away.

‘You ought to remember me,’ he said. ‘I wonder why you don’t?’

‘Mind on other things,’ Missy replied. She gave a light shrug, then brought her knee up to his groin. When he doubled over, she ran for the doorway up ahead, hoping her TARDIS hadn’t gone far without her.

***

‘Braga’s not answering, Mr Glitz,’ said the henchman named Rocca. Glitz sighed and glowered at him.

‘Well, what are you telling me for? Go and find him. The Doctor’s friend can’t’ve got far.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ said the Doctor. The pain in his shoulder had subsided to a dull throb so he tried again to sit up. He managed this time to prop himself up on his good arm.

‘What’s happened to you, Glitz? You were always a crook but robbing battlefields? Picking trinkets off corpses? Isn’t that a bit low, even for you?’

‘I suppose I ought to thank you for being the architect of my success, Doctor,’ Glitz replied. ‘I’m reliably told that without you, the war might not have been half as bloody. I’m only sorry you had to destroy Gallifrey. Would’ve been a prime bit of real estate once all you Time Lords cleared off it.’

‘If I hadn’t acted as I did,’ said the Doctor, choosing his words carefully so as not to give too much away, ‘there wouldn’t have been a Gallifrey left for you to loot. There wouldn’t have been a universe left for that matter.’

‘The great Doctor, saving the galaxy, by wiping it out if he has to. And you dare to sit in judgement on me? You want to know what happened after the Time Lords got it into their heads that someone was trying to recruit Andromedans to fight in your war? The Daleks came, Doctor. They came looking for Time Lords and their allies and Time Lord technology. They destroyed hundreds of planets in the Third Zone. There isn’t a First or Second Zone any more. Those burned up in the space of a few hours.’

‘I know,’ the Doctor said.

‘Those of us who were left, what choice did we have? No industry, barely any working tech that hadn’t either been commandeered by the military to defend our galaxy or destroyed by the creatures coming to attack us. We had to make do where we could in order to survive. I’m not ashamed of robbing the dead of Gallifrey. They owed us.’

‘I’m sorry, Glitz. I truly am.’

‘Somehow, Doctor, I imagine you’ve said that so many times, it doesn’t mean anything by now. Ferris, get him into…’

He frowned and looked around him. The Doctor had been concentrating on staying conscious and on trying to read Glitz’s body language and expression for any sign of mercy. He hadn’t paid any attention to Glitz’s bodyguards. The one called Rocca had jogged off in search of Missy, but another one had been emerged from somewhere in the shadows and stood a pace or so behind Glitz. Only now he wasn’t.

‘Ferris?’ Glitz called. ‘Where are you, you miserable screed? I didn’t tell you to go anywhere.’

‘Glitz…’ The Doctor began. He tried again to sit up but the muscles in his shoulder felt like they were tearing apart. He collapsed back to the floor with a groan. When he looked up again, Glitz had turned away from him, but was stepping slowly backwards.

‘You?’ he said, then he let out a strange, guttural noise as if something had caught in his throat. He toppled, twirling round before he hit the ground so that the Doctor caught a glimpse of blood on the front of his satin shirt as he fell. He lay a few inches from the Doctor’s feet, unmoving.

The Doctor listened as someone came closer, walked around him to his side. At first the figure was silhouetted against the overhead lights, but then he crouched onto his haunches and the Doctor saw him clearly for the first time.

‘No,’ the Doctor said. ‘No, not you.’

The figure tossed the scarred confession dial down beside the Doctor and it hit the floor with a dull metallic clatter. Then he reached forward, lifted the Doctor’s jacket and rummaged in the pockets. The Doctor knew he should fight back but with every beat of his hearts, he was losing more blood from his wounds. Already he was dizzy and his vision blurred. He caught the stranger’s sleeve but felt his hand batted away as if it were a scrap of paper.

‘It can’t be you,’ he said. ‘You can’t be here.’

‘I’m afraid I am, Doctor.’ That voice. The Doctor closed his eyes and he could picture the first time he’d heard it, when he’d walked into the darkened courtroom on the Time Lord space station Zenobia, pulled out of time by the High Council for a show trial aimed at getting him out of the way for good. It came back in flashes. His companion, Peri, dying on the screen as he was forced to watch. The Master, as he was back then, gloating at them from the trial room screen.

‘ _There is some evil in all of us, Doctor, even you. The Valeyard is an amalgamation of the darker sides of your nature, somewhere between your twelfth and final regeneration.’_

‘You can’t be here,’ he repeated weakly. Forming words took an increasing effort.

As the Valeyard straightened, something caught the light and glinted. Somewhere in the haze, the Doctor recognised the TARDIS key and try to grab it back, but wasn’t even sure if his arm moved or not. He saw the Valeyard stand, pocket the key, and laugh, before he walked away.

‘Valeyard!’ the Doctor called after him. The world was getting darker and he was so tired. He knew he should try to follow, but all the Doctor wanted to do at that moment was sleep.

***

Bill tapped her fingers on the railing around the upper level of the console room, eyeing the bookcase, but she’d already tried to read four different books and hadn’t been able to concentrate on more than a few lines. She checked her watch again. This was taking far too long. Nardole, meanwhile, was sitting on one of the seats down by the console, engrossed in a battered copy of Moby Dick. Stuff this, she thought, and headed for the stairs.

Nardole got up in one sweeping movement and was blocking her path before she’d managed three steps.

‘It’s a big ship, it might take them a while.’

‘Not this long,’ Bill retorted. ‘And anyway, four of us looking, we could find it in half the time.’

‘Four of us looking doubles the chance of one of us getting caught.’

‘I can’t just sit here and…’

A key rattled in the TARDIS door. The relief seemed to let all the air out of Bill’s body.

‘Finally,’ she muttered and went to push past Nardole so she could greet the Doctor as he returned.

Only the man who entered was not the Doctor. Nardole grabbed her arm and pulled her back as she made to step forward, shaking his head in warning. They watched as a man dressed in all in black dashed into the TARDIS as if something was chasing him. He closed the door and stood there, his back towards them, looking out through the small window.

Nardole tapped Bill’s arm and gestured to her to go back upstairs. They crept up and ducked behind the Doctor’s chalkboard, which was sitting on the walkway at an angle. It gave at least a bit of cover. From there, Bill watched as the stranger backed slowly away from the doors and entered the console room properly. A sonorous note boomed through the air. The TARDIS’s warning system, it’s ‘cloister bell’ the Doctor called it. Bill looked at Nardole, hoping he’d know what was going on but he looked as confused and concerned as she was.

The cloister bell tolled again, but the stranger pulled a device from his pocket, something similar to the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver, only the light it produced as it whirred was red rather than blue.

‘Oh, do shut up,’ he muttered. His voice was rich and cultured, the sort of posh home counties accent you never heard these days except in old films. He gave the controls a swift thump and the bell ceased. He continued to move around the console, confident in what he was doing. He obviously knew how the TARDIS worked. Bill saw him throw the switch that started the engines and the ship groaned as it dematerialised. Again she looked to Nardole, but he gestured to her to stay quiet.

‘Are you going to spend the entire time up there or shall we be civilised and talk to one another?’ asked the stranger, still with his back towards them.

He turned and looked directly at Bill. Her heart stuck in her throat and she looked about her for anything that might be a decent weapon. There was a toolbox lying open by one of the bookcases. She grabbed the first thing she saw, something that did actually look like a hand gun only with a lot more tubes and nozzles. Hopefully it could do some damage if needs be. She got up, ignoring Nardole’s attempts to pull her back down again. He shook his head feverishly, but she made sure not to react and give his position away, just in case the stranger hadn’t noticed there were two of them.

She came slowly down the stairs, holding the gun in both hands, aimed at the stranger’s chest. He was dressed all in black - frock coat, a long waistcoat and leather calf boots. He raised his hands, smiling, but there was something seriously malicious about the expression.

‘Bill Potts,’ he said.

A lump of ice formed in Bill’s chest but she made sure to keep her aim steady.

‘So you know my name. Wanna tell me who you are and what you’re doing here?’

‘Or what? You’ll shoot me?’

‘If I have to.’

His smile widened and he gave a low chuckle. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why’s that then?’

‘Firstly, because you wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man in cold blood. Secondly, the TARDIS console room exists within a state of grace. Weapons can’t be fired. And thirdly, because that’s a device for cleaning fluff out of the control panels.’

She cursed inside her head, weighed up the possibility that he might be lying just to throw her off her guard, then aimed at the wall just past his head and pressed the trigger. All that came from the gun was a brisk puff of air. The stranger lowered his hands and leaned on the console. Bill glanced about again for something better to defend herself with and saw nothing this time, so she turned the gun around and gripped it by its barrel.

‘Maybe, but I can still whack you with it if you try anything, and see if your state of grace stops that.’

He laughed, but then his expression turned pensive. ‘If you’re here, where’s the other one?’ He looked past her at the chalkboard where Nardole was still hiding.

‘Won’t you join us, Nardole?’ he called up. ‘I think Bill could use the moral support.’Nardole got up and stormed downstairs, belligerent determination pulling his features into a frown.

‘Who are you?’

‘What’ve you done with the Doctor?’ Bill added.

The stranger looked back and forth between them, then Bill saw his face slacken as if an idea had just occurred. He laid his hands on his cheeks, then ran his fingers through his hair.

‘Good Lord,’ he said, ‘did I change?’

‘You what?’ Bill asked.

The stranger held his hands out in front of him and turned them over, examining them critically. ‘Glitz shot me. I didn’t realise the injury was so bad. I must’ve… I was unconscious. When I awoke, my first thought was to get back to you two and get us to safety. I hadn’t realised I’d changed.’

‘Where’s Missy?’ Bill asked.

‘Miss… oh, yes. Dead, I’m afraid. There was nothing I could do. It all happened so quickly.’ He looked imploringly at them and took a step nearer to Bill. She recoiled on instinct and nearly fell as her ankle hit the first tread of the stairs.

‘Have I really changed so much?’ the stranger asked. He sounded so earnest now that Bill’s resolve faltered a little. ‘Don’t you know me, Bill? Can’t you see me?’

‘You regenerated?’ Nardole asked.

‘I must’ve,’ said the stranger. He pressed his fingers to his throat. ‘Of course, the voice is different. That ought to have been a clue. I’m not longer… what was I? Scottish.’

‘You’re the Doctor?’ Bill asked.

She studied his face, looking for something familiar, but the man was a total stranger. He lowered his head for a moment, then unbuttoned the cuff of his shirt to expose his wrist and held his hand out to her. It took her a moment to realise what he wanted, and again she looked right into his eyes for a sign that he was going to jump her or something. But Nardole was there, and she could still thump him if she needed to. She pressed her fingers against his wrist and felt his pulse.

‘Two hearts,’ she said to Nardole, then backed away again.

The Doctor had told her he could change, but he threw so many things like that into conversation it was sometimes hard to know if he was being serious or not. He’d said he’d had a dozen faces, a dozen bodies, and that he never really knew what he’d end up with when the time came. She watched the stranger for a long time, asking herself if it could really be true. This man was maybe twenty years younger than the Doctor, _her_ Doctor. Everything about him was harsher, somehow, than the eccentric figure she knew, with his shock of silver hair and slightly terrifying eyebrows. Was it possible it was the same man?

‘You actually regenerated?’ she asked, knowing as soon as she said it that it was a stupid question.

‘Must have done,’ he replied. ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you.’

‘And, em…’ Nardole began, ‘did you regenerate yourself a new outfit as well?’

Bill stared. She’d noticed the way the stranger was dressed but it hadn’t occurred to her there was anything odd. In her mind, she’d pictured something like Beauty and the Beast where there’s a ball of light and everyone comes out the other end all neatly dressed and in their proper form. The stranger, for a moment, looked like he was trying to think up a reply, then he sighed.

‘You know, I really hoped we could conduct this amicably.’ He reached beneath his coat and drew out a pistol he must have had tucked into his waistband. ‘But you just have to be clever, don’t you?’

‘You said you were unarmed,’ Nardole protested.

Bill smiled. ‘And you also said you can’t fire weapons in here, so that’s not gonna be any use to you, is it?’

Without taking his eyes off her, the stranger pointed his gun over his shoulder and fired. The shot hit one of the bookcases behind him and a shower of sparks rained down, along with a few scorched and smoking pages. He took aim at them again and this time Bill raised her hands, dropping the air gun.

‘I think we’ve established that veracity isn’t one of my strengths.’


	4. Loopholes

Loopholes

The Doctor heard klaxons wailing but they sounded so far away they didn’t really matter. They were probably part of a dream anyway. Unless he was dead. It would just be his luck to arrive in the afterlife on the day they got invaded by something. It was an awful noise though, growing louder, and almost keeping time with the throbbing headache he had. Was it possible to have a headache in a dream? Or if you were dead, for that matter? The noise gained in volume again and now other sensations came with it. He felt a hard surface against the back of his head, his hips and his shoulders. Lying on the floor maybe, he thought. That didn’t seem too clever an idea, to lie down in the middle of an emergency. Wasn’t like him either. He should get up.

He took a deep breath and opened his eyes. Red lights flashed and made his eyes water until he grew accustomed to the glare. Then he blinked and looked at the ceiling above him. Very high and mostly lost in darkness, apart from where there were those red lights. Vibration through the floor told him it was a spaceship in flight. Red flashing lights and loud, wailing alarms on a spaceship was never a good thing. Time to get up, Doctor. Enough lying around.

He ordered himself to sit up, only as soon as his muscles tensed and came back online, his body filled with pain. It washed all over him, leaving him out of breath, before finally settling down to a steady pulse centred around his right shoulder. Hadn’t he been shot there recently? That would explain the lying down. But pain or not, he had to get up. Come on, Doctor, you’ve had worse than this. Remember the castle in the confession dial. A day and a half of agony, dragging yourself along corridors. Compared to that, a few third degree burns and torn muscles was nothing. He braced himself for the pain and tried again.

This time he managed to flop over onto his stomach, but had to stay there for a while, teeth gritted, until his shoulder calmed down enough to try another movement. He drew his knees up beneath him and, grabbing the leg of a nearby cabinet, pulled himself up onto his feet. He stood there, hunched over the glass case, clutching his injured arm to his chest. Inside the display case lay a scattering of objects, some Dalek, some Time Lord, all fragments, but there was a circular depression in the middle of the black velvet cushion where something else had been.

The castle, he thought again, something to do with… Confession dial. He remembered taking it out. Glitz. The shot. Glitz had…

He turned and saw the body on the floor, face down with a pool of blood congealing around the head. He’d been killed. He was killed by…

The Doctor’s breath caught in his throat as the rest of it flooded back. He patted his coat pocket with his good hand and found to his dismay that the TARDIS key was no longer there. It hadn’t been a nightmare then. He had to find the TARDIS. He had to get to it before the Valeyard did.

He lurched away from the cabinet but without its support, his legs gave way and he fell back to his knees. The impact jarred his shoulder and he cried out, his voice echoing around the cargo hall. But even if he had to crawl, he had to get back to the TARDIS. Bill and Nardole were there.

Someone took hold of his uninjured arm and pulled him back up. He felt someone slip beneath him to take some of his weight, draping his arm around their shoulders while they held him round the waist. Then slowly he was moving forward in the right direction. He glanced to his side, and couldn’t decide if he was astounded or just touched at what he saw.‘Thought you’d be long gone,’ he said.

‘So did I,’ muttered Missy darkly.

He waited for her to explain, but she was oddly quiet and distracted. They limped on together along the hold until they came to the spot where the TARDIS had been hidden amongst some tarpaulined equipment. There was only an empty space there now.

‘No,’ the Doctor rasped.

He felt his strength wane again and only stayed standing because Missy had a hold of him. Bill and Nardole were in the TARDIS. That meant they were probably dead, and it was all his fault. This entire expedition had been his idea. It had been a way to bring Missy out of the vault and see how she would fare on a short trip off Earth, something that shouldn’t have been dangerous, and yet he should’ve known it would be. When was it not?

‘The Valeyard,’ he began.

‘Had the pleasure,’ Missy replied. ‘Not what I’d imagined, I have to say. I’d always sort of pictured you but just with a beard or something. But he was not exactly difficult to look at for a psychopathic murdering version of you.’

There was a touch of nervousness in her voice that betrayed her. She’d been scared, the Doctor thought. And why not? The Master at his worst was nothing compared to the darkness he knew lurked inside him.

‘He’s taken the TARDIS,’ the Doctor said.

‘Gathered that. I’m not one of your little pets, dear, I can keep up with the chain of events without a running commentary.’

‘Bill and Nardole are in there. Glitz’s ship has no way of tracking a TARDIS. Maybe there’s something in one of these cabinets that can…’

Missy cleared her throat very deliberately.

‘What?’

‘Why did we come here?’ she asked.

The Doctor, still a little foggy, stared back at her, then he looked at the doorway she’d led him to. It was one of the exits from the hold into the rest of the ship, and sitting on the grille floor of a long corridor ahead of them was a battered stone column. Lying in the shadows behind it were more bodies. He glanced at Missy, but she returned a look of complete innocence.

‘That Valeyard,’ she said. ‘What a monster. Still, they were about to steal my TARDIS so I suppose we owe him one.’

The Doctor couldn’t decide if he believed her or not, but it wasn’t the moment to worry about that.

‘He can’t’ve got far,’ Missy said. She stood on tiptoe and patted around the top of the column, keeping hold of the Doctor all the while. ‘Scanners should be able to pick him up… There.’

She brought down a key and unlocked the door. They fell more than walked into the console room and Missy left the Doctor leaning against a control panel while she darted to the other side and started the engines. The Doctor looked around, hoping to find a couch or somewhere soft where he could sleep for a while. Just for a little while. The floor, though, was strewn with clothes, books, bits and pieces of electronic equipment, what looked like wooden puzzle boxes and other odds and ends. The rail around the console was draped in clothes, including a black velvet coat the Doctor recognised as having belonged to the Master’s former incarnation, one of the ones with a beard if he remembered rightly.

‘Sit down. I’ll get a medical kit in a minute once we’ve locked onto him,’ Missy told him.

‘Did you crash land?’ the Doctor asked.

‘What? No.’

‘Then were Glitz’s men in here ransacking the place?’

‘No, they…’ She straightened and glowered through the glass cylinder of the time rotor. ‘I haven’t had a chance to tidy up in a while.’

‘A while? Like, a few centuries.’

‘Just sit down.’

‘I would, but there don’t seem to be any surfaces.’

She growled in the back of her throat and stomped around to him, lifted an armful of clothes from one of the railings and shoved him towards it. ‘There. Sit.’

She threw the clothes into a corner and ducked beneath the console, bringing out a small purple packet, which she dumped on his lap. ‘Simitan algae. Shove a handful of it on and it should repair the damage in an hour or so.’

‘You’re being very helpful,’ the Doctor remarked as he unwrapped the algae kit. ‘You could easily have taken off and left me there.’

She shrugged but didn’t look at him, continuing to operate the controls. ‘Maybe I don’t like the idea of something more evil than I am roaming around the cosmos. You’re bad enough, but a version of you without the do-goody morals is the stuff of nightmares.’

‘Or maybe you just knew it was the right thing to do.’

‘Does that really sound like me?’ She still didn’t look at him.

The Doctor allowed himself a smile. He managed to slip his coat off his shoulders without too much discomfort but saw that the right side was almost completely destroyed, curled and charred all around the arm and down the front. His jumper beneath was even more of a write off. Admittedly it had been full of holes to begin with but those were deliberate. Those were artistic holes. Now it was missing a large section on the right hand side. What remained was so brittle from the heat of the blast that it crumbled as he touched it. He slipped it off, decided that his t-shirt could live with only one arm and so could stay, and scooped up a handful of the reddish goo inside the pack Missy had given him.

It was only then that something hit him, something she’d said earlier when he’d been more concerned about the TARDIS and only half paying attention. It had taken a while but it finally filtered through.

‘You said he wasn’t what you expected.’

Missy glanced up from her monitor and looked blankly at him. ‘Who?’

‘The Valeyard. Back there, you said he wasn’t what you’d imagined. But you’ve met him.’ He pointed at the black velvet coat draped over the rail nearby. ‘Back when you were this fellow.’

Missy frowned. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve never seen the Valeyard in person before. Just heard the stories.’

‘Yes you have, you saw him during the trial.’

‘What trial? Mine or yours?’

‘Mine. This…The same time as you met Glitz. You were working with him. You tried to destroy the Valeyard. Not that you got very far, but then it wasn’t exactly the best plan in the universe from what I saw of it.’

‘Did you hit your head when you fell?’ Missy asked. ‘I have no idea what you’re on about. I…’ She fixed her attention on the monitors again as something on her console bleeped. ‘Got him.’

The Doctor wanted to ask more. He couldn’t understand this, but watching Missy as she spoke, there was no hint of deception there. She looked genuinely baffled, which left him genuinely baffled in return. But there was a time and a place for that discussion and this wasn’t it. There were more important things. Bill and Nardole might still be alive and he had to do all he could to keep them that way.

***

‘Where are we going?’ Bill demanded.

She and Nardole sat together on the stairs, while the man in black danced around from panel to panel of the console. It was the same sort of movement the Doctor carried out when he was piloting but somehow this man was less frenetic, more suave and unconcerned. His jaw was set and his eyes narrow as if, should any problem occur, he would simply blast it out of his way and carry on. That was why she hadn’t risked making a run for it yet. They could make for the doors on the upper level, lose themselves in the ship’s internal labyrinth of rooms, but she hadn’t dared yet. Something told her their abductor would be a crack shot and a very fast draw.

‘I have some unfinished business with the High Council of Gallifrey,’ the man replied.

‘Gallifrey, like where the Doctor’s from? But I thought you couldn’t go there. He said…’

‘The Doctor says a lot of things, my dear, and not all of them are entirely synonymous with the truth.’

‘Gallifrey was lost,’ Nardole said.

‘I am well aware of that.’

‘Then how do you expect to get there?’ Bill asked.

‘I don’t. I have no interest in visiting the ruins of my people. Prior to my imprisonment I was on a mission to ensure this ridiculous Time War never took place. I can only consider it my duty to continue, now I finally have my freedom. And, should the Doctor perish in the process, that could only be considered a bonus.’

‘You want to stop the Time War from happening?’

He turned and gave her a disparaging look. ‘Is that your only contribution, Ms Potts, to repeat everything I say?’

‘You can’t prevent the Time War from happening,’ Nardole said. ‘The events are time locked. You can’t even get near the crucial nexus points.’

‘Who told you that? The Doctor?’

Nardole shrank back slightly but continued to glare.

‘Every lock can be picked, my dear Nardole, you should know that,’ said the man. ‘If one has the necessary skills. True, Gallifrey itself and the events of the Time War and all its direct causal precursors are impenetrably locked but there are always weak spots. Places that were connected to Gallifrey but were destroyed long before the Time War, for instance.’ He flashed a smile as sharp as a razor. ‘I would take hold of the bannister if I were you. It could be quite a bumpy ride. The TARDIS will have to penetrate some quite sophisticated temporal engineering.’

‘Oh, thanks,’ said Bill, ‘that’s really nice of you to look out for us.’ She hoped her sarcasm was obvious.

‘You’re more than welcome,’ the man replied. ‘Though to be honest I just don’t want people splattered across the console room by the temporal stresses while I’m trying to work.’

He turned back to the console, just as the TARDIS lurched so violently he was thrown to the floor. Bill grabbed the bannister and managed not to tumble down the stairs. Nardole was not so lucky, rolling down to the lower level where he cracked his head on the floor. He sat up, rubbing his scalp, but then he froze, staring at the control panel. Bill followed his gaze and saw it too. One of the monitor screens had come to life. It showed the usual indecipherable circles but right across the middle, in big, red letters, it read, _TETHER REQUEST RECEIVED. ACCEPT Y/N?_

While the man in black was busy picking himself up off the floor, Nardole darted to the console and hit the button. The TARDIS juddered again and this time the stranger fell against the console. He frowned and grabbed the nearest screen, pulling it round on its arm until it was in front of him.

‘What’s the matter?’ Bill asked, unable to stop smiling.

The man cursed and punched the controls. ‘No!’

‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking,’ said a voice. It filled the console room and made Bill jump to her feet.

The Doctor appeared a second later on one of the screens, smiling. He was only wearing his white t shirt and that was completely disintegrated around one shoulder. She thought she saw some angry looking burns on the skin beneath. But he was there, alive.

‘You may be experiencing some slight turbulence at present, so you might want to fasten your seatbelts. Unless, of course, you’re stealing my TARDIS, in which case you might want to consider how you’re going to escape before I find you.’

‘Doctor!’ Bill called out. She hurried forward but the stranger whipped round and aimed his gun at her. She shrank back.

‘Bill, very glad to hear you. Is Nardole with you?’

‘Yeah, he’s fine, but…’

‘What have you done?’ the stranger interrupted.

‘Now, Valeyard, you of all people should know I will not stand idly by and let you put my friends in harm’s way. So I’m coming to get you and you’d better hope they’re safe and well when I arrive.’

‘The Valeyard,’ Nardole whispered. Bill turned to him and saw his cheeks were ashen. He stared, wide-eyed at the stranger and Bill thought she’d never seen him look so afraid.

‘What’s a Valeyard?’ she asked. ‘Is that a bad thing?’

***

The Doctor pulled one of Missy’s screens around until he could read the display. Another above the console still showed the Valeyard, looking decidedly irate now, petulant in defeat. The trouble with dangerous people was that if they think they’re losing they get desperate, and they do stupid things. And though he was relieved beyond measure to know Bill and Nardole were alive, the Doctor was still painfully aware that they were standing in the TARDIS with a man who would kill them without a second thought.

‘Whether your friends remain unharmed is entirely up to you,’ the Valeyard said. ‘Release the TARDIS and allow me to complete my mission and I shall leave your companions on a habitable planet. You can collect them at your leisure but only when my work is done.’

‘Oh, a mission? You have a mission? And what mission is that? Isn’t it usually killing me or have you got bored with that one?’

‘Oh, I doubt I shall ever grow bored of planning your demise, Doctor. You might say it’s my raison d’être. I shall…’

A loud clunk came through the speakers and the Valeyard frowned. Then he closed his eyes and slumped out of the screen’s field of vision. Bill and Nardole appeared, their faces filling the monitor. Bill was holding that ridiculous air machine he’d bought a month or so back to try and clean up the console room.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Nardole said the Valeyard was a bad thing.’

The Doctor smiled. ‘Make sure he’s secure. Nardole, he seems to have locked the co-ordinates. I can’t make the connection from here to change your course. Where was he headed?’

‘He said something about going back before the Time War,’ Bill replied. ‘Like, he wanted to stop it or something.’

Missy let out a short, derisive laugh.

‘He can’t,’ said the Doctor. ‘All the events leading to and involved in the Time War are locked. No one can go near them.’

‘That’s what I said,’ replied Nardole.

‘He said he had a way,’ Bill went on. ‘Something about finding a weak spot.’

‘It’s a time lock. There are no weak spots…’ The Doctor trailed off, thinking.

A growing feeling of unease started to coil up in the pit of his stomach. He’d thought there was no way for Gallifrey to make contact with this universe again after the planet was displaced, yet they’d managed to find themselves cracks in time and space, or even use the Master’s insanity as a conduit through the barriers between dimensions. And he himself had travelled back to the pivotal moment in the war, albeit with the help of a sentient weapon. There were ways.

‘He can’t possibly have…’

‘He said something about places that were destroyed before the war,’ Bill said. ‘Places connected to Gallifrey.’

The Doctor looked up and saw Missy’s brows raise as the same thought evidently occurred to her. That could actually do it. Something that no longer existed by the time the Time War was set on its course might not have been within the greater focus of the lock.

The TARDIS began to shudder and the Doctor had to grab the console to stop himself from falling. The act sent another jolt of pain through his shoulder but it was easing slightly. He retrieved the monitor he’d been studying as it tried to swing round the console out of reach and waited until the display stopped pixelating and breaking up and settled again on the readouts. The trajectory the other TARDIS, his TARDIS was following made no sense. Some of the calculations were incomprehensible without a good few hours to work through them. He supposed the Valeyard had had ample time to think about all this.

In his peripheral vision, he was vaguely aware of Missy, working rapidly at the controls. Trying to stabilise their flight, he hoped, and at the same time that of the other TARDIS. Think, Doctor, he told himself, and thumped his temple. Think, think. Places that were destroyed before the Time War but still connected to Gallifrey. There was Shada, the Time Lord penal colony, but that would make no sense as the Valeyard would surely be too wary of ending up an inmate there, and even if he managed to stay free, there was very little connection back to the Time Lord homeworld for security reasons. No, not Shada. Think.

‘We’re hitting the temporal displacement fields,’ Missy said. The TARDIS shook again, throwing things from shelves to add even more mess to the floor. ‘The pull’s too strong. If we try to back off now, it’ll tear both ships apart.’

‘I know.’ The Doctor had realised that as soon as he’d seen the sort of course they were on. ‘We’ll have to ride it out and hope we can find our way back from the other side, assuming we actually get anywhere and aren’t atomised by the temporal distortion. Bill, Nardole, hold onto something.’

‘Yeah,’ said Bill dryly, ‘kind of got that already.’

Missy had keyed up the outer scanner to one of the screens and the Doctor watched the vortex warp and distort ahead of them. Energy discharges flashed like lightning and each time one hit the ship, the TARDIS lurched. The Doctor hit the floor again and landed right on his injured shoulder. Missy, meanwhile, let out a shriek of delight like a child on a rollercoaster. The Doctor sat up, but took a moment let the pain subside and to warm up his brain again. Think, Doctor. Not a colony. Shada was the only one. So where then? An outpost?

The answer hit him about a second before the storms ahead of them cleared and the picture on the scanner showed open space and glittering stars again. It was so obvious then that he gave himself another thump on the temple for being so dense.

‘Of course,’ he said.

‘Doctor, you all right? Bill asked. ‘Where are you?’

The Doctor got up off the floor and found Missy staring up at the scanner too, a faint smile just on the corner of her mouth.

‘I’m fine,’ the Doctor replied. ‘Everyone there still intact?’

‘Bar a nice collection of bruises,’ said Nardole wearily. ‘That’ll swell up in the morning something terrible.’

‘Doctor, what is that?’ Bill asked.

The Doctor watched as the two TARDISes circled the structure that had appeared ahead of them. It had a faintly gothic look about it, as did most Gallifreyan engineering of the post-Rassilon era. It was a space station, formed of one large ring of units around a central spire that looked more suited to a cathedral. Around it lay the debris of countless ships, a wide Sargasso Sea of space junk that glittered in the light of a nearby star.

‘Zenobia station,’ the Doctor said. ‘One of the few Time Lord bases away from Gallifrey. It was destroyed not long after my trial was held there. That must be why he chose it. That and the damage to the timelines already present here thanks to our last meeting.’

‘Your trial?’ Bill asked. Trust her to have picked up on that bit.

The Doctor tried to look nonchalant. ‘Just a misunderstanding. Or, actually more of a setup. The High Council wanted rid of me.’

‘Lot of people seem to want that.’

‘Don’t they just,’ Missy put in.

‘But,’ Bill went on, ‘I don’t…’

The Doctor raised his hand. ‘It’s a long and really rather convoluted story. I’ll tell you when I see you. Right now we need to find somewhere safe to land before the station sensors pick us up, and then we need to calculate how to get back home again. We’ll bring you down with the tether once we’ve figured out the best time to set down.’

He saw her nod in agreement, so he switched off the communications channel.

Missy leaned on the console, regarding him coolly. ‘So, what is the best time? I would presume sometime before this station explodes?’

‘This used to be a research station before it was converted into the halls of justice. Too many Time Lords wandering around back then, too much distortion from the experiments.’

‘So, once it became a courtroom then.’

‘Yes. Oh, but after my trial. Don’t want to run into myself running into myself. That could get very confusing. It’ll only leave us about a day before the explosion but that should be more than enough time to work out the trajectory.’

‘OK, so which trial?’

The Doctor caught hold of the railing and managed to lower himself back onto it. He checked the patch of algae and saw it had fallen off sometime during the flight. His shoulder had healed a little but was nowhere near ready, and it was starting to throb again. He found the plastic pack where it had fallen on the floor amongst a pile of shoes, took another handful and started lathering it over the wound.

‘My trial. _The_ trial. The one the Valeyard tried to engineer. We need to land. They’ll spot us any second now. It’s an automated system but it’ll alert someone on Gallifrey. Just set the co-ordinates.’

Missy stared at him, looked about to say something but then gave an exasperated sigh and flung a few switches. The engines wheezed as they came in to land.


	5. Fixed Points in Time

Fixed Points In Time

The Doctor stepped out into a large room, split over two levels with a desk and bookcase on the upper and a long couch and wall-mounted monitor on the lower. Its décor prompted a few bittersweet memories. The muted browns, the brass decorations on the walls, all so typical of the Time Lords during the late Borussan period, gave him a slight tightness in his hearts as he remembered other times, other visits home. All the while, though, the thought remained that this was long gone. Once he’d solved his current problems, he’d return to his own place in the time stream and this would all be memories again.

He reckoned they’d landed in the office reserved for the Valeyard in charge of the prosecution, seeing as there was a set of robes hanging on a stand on the upper level in front of a full length mirror. There room had a quiet, sleepy feel, which reassured him that they’d landed at the right time. He knew his own trial was the last one this station ever hosted. A few days after his former self had left, Zenobia had been destroyed in a critical power overload. The official records on Gallifrey had that down to wear and tear in the system but he’d always suspected it was probably his fault. He had fought the Valeyard here and no doubt left a lot of damage in his wake. Still, right at that moment, they were alone on the station. No one had died in the explosion, according to the records, so everyone had to have left after the trial.

The best sight in the office, however, was his own TARDIS. His and Missy’s capsules had landed on the lower level, one on either side of the door. Missy sauntered out, hands on hips, and looked around. The Doctor heard the familiar creak of his own TARDIS door and turned as Bill hurried out. A look of horror passed over her face as she spotted his injuries, and when she came forward and pulled him into a hug, it was far more tentative than usual.

‘You all right?’ she asked.

‘You know me, I’m indestructible,’ the Doctor joked. He rubbed the still quite tender skin on his shoulder, and made a vain attempt to pull the tatters of his t-shirt up to cover it. He’d shoved on one of Missy’s jackets, the first thing that had come to had, which had turned out to be the black velvet coat he’d spotted earlier. ‘Looks worse than it is.’

Nardole emerged from the TARDIS with the Valeyard, hands bound, in tow. The Valeyard paused for a moment, taking in his surroundings, then threw the Doctor a look of such malice it would’ve been chilling if the Doctor hadn’t seen it before and expected it. The Doctor crossed to him, looking for any hint as to who or what this man really was. All these centuries and he’d never had the chance to examine the Valeyard up close. Any time they’d run into each other, there was usually an impending threat of death to deal with first. But the Doctor had never really understood what exactly the Valeyard was or where he came from, and studying him now, he still couldn’t tell. This wasn’t the same as meeting his other selves. The telepathic tug he felt with them was totally different.

‘So, where are we?’ Bill asked.

‘Time Lord space station,’ the Doctor replied. ‘Used to be a research outpost for dangerous experiments. Stellar engineering, making artificial black holes, that sort of thing. Stuff you don’t want on your own planet because if it goes wrong, you might wake up the next morning and your world’s imploded to the size of a tennis ball. Then it was converted to house one of the courtrooms for the Halls of Law, to try the politically sensitive cases, the ultra-dangerous criminals. Again, all the stuff you don’t want in your own back yard.’

‘But are we okay here?’ She gestured around the room. ‘Won’t anyone notice?’

‘Once the station became a courtroom, they only ever left a skeleton staff here, unless there was a trial in session. One’s just ended, the last one held here, so we’ll have a day or so. This is the Valeyard’s office. There’s no reason for anyone to come in here. It’ll be fine.’

‘He’s got an office?’

‘Not his specifically,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’ll be used by whoever’s prosecuting the case at the time. Valeyard just means ‘learned court prosecutor’. It’s just a title.’

‘Like ‘Doctor’,’ the Valeyard put in with a faint smile.

He was trying to rouse a reaction, so the Doctor ignored him.

‘We don’t have much time, though,’ he said to Bill instead. ‘Every second we spend here puts the future of the universe in jeopardy. We need to figure out how we got through the barriers in the first place and how we get back.’ He turned and approached the Valeyard. ‘So how about you start by telling us how you did it? Show us how clever you are? You enjoy that sort of thing.’

‘Why should I help you?’ the Valeyard asked. ‘I have the outcome I wanted.’

‘I would like to think, if you really are me, that you’re not entirely stupid. You know the events of the Time War cannot be altered…’

‘Such as avoiding the destruction of Gallifrey? Rewriting history so the planet survives?’

‘That’s different,’ the Doctor said. ‘The outcome in that instance was the same. Gallifrey was lost. Time progressed as before. The changes were only minor…’

The Valeyard laughed quietly. ‘Only minor?’

‘There isn’t time for this. Every second we stay here, we risk upsetting the timeline and this close to Gallifrey, one wrong move and the results could be beyond catastrophic.’

The Valeyard straightened. ‘You always did have a penchant for the melodramatic, Doctor.’

‘The Time War and the fate of Gallifrey is protected for a reason. Those events are so intrinsically woven into the Web of Time, to interfere in even the smallest way would risk unravelling the entire fabric of the universe, not to mention unleashing everything the time lock was designed to contain. You say you share my memories, so you have seen the things I saw, the monstrosities that war produced. You know as well as I do what would happen to reality if those things were let loose. I don’t find it ‘melodramatic’ to be a little concerned about that.’

‘Well, I’m sure you’ll put it right, Doctor. I have every faith in you.’ The Valeyard flashed a brief and icy smile. ‘And if not, a universe littered with monstrosities sounds like just the place for me, doesn’t it?’

‘The Master said you were me,’ the Doctor went on.

Missy, who’d set herself up at the Valeyard’s desk and was reading one of his files, looked up and scowled. ‘I said?’

‘Somewhere between my twelfth and final regeneration,’ said the Doctor. ‘Now, I spent years dreading the day I’d regenerate and see your face in the mirror, but it didn’t happen. Admittedly, this is a whole new cycle of regenerations so I suppose there’s a possibility that you might turn up round about my _next_ twelfth and final one, but that seems a bit of a stretch, and the fact is, I know when I am speaking to myself…’

‘I’m sure there’s an apposite medical term for that,’ muttered the Valeyard.

‘I know when I meet one of my former selves. Maybe not at first. Can take a minute to register but it is always there.’ He tapped his temple. ‘In here. And I don’t feel any of that with you, so what exactly are you?’

‘What does it matter?’

‘It would satisfy my curiosity.’

The Doctor saw the Valeyard’s resolve waver just for a second. A tiny twitch of indecision crossed his face and for the first time in their conversation, the Valeyard looked away. Then he let out a deep sigh.

‘I suppose it’s of little consequence whether you know or not,’ he admitted. ‘I was formed in the Matrix from those memories and experiences that the Time Lords deemed too unsavoury to remain in the main system. All your nightmares, Doctor, all the times you’ve felt that rage inside you and wanted to burn the stars. All the fury you feel at the unfairness of a universe that adopted you as its saviour but gave you nothing but heartbreak and cruelty in return. All those times you wanted to slink into the darkness and give up. All the grief you’ve felt when you inevitably have to watch your friends suffer and die. That is what I am, Doctor. My existence consists solely of your pain. I close my eyes and I see it all, over and over. The ones you couldn’t save. Donna, Amy, Adric, Rory, Clara, even poor old Bill here.’

‘What about me?’ Bill asked.

The Valeyard regarded her for a long time and when at last he turned around again, the Doctor imagined he saw pain in the other man’s expression, though again it was quickly hidden beneath the usual mask of arrogance.

‘So you see, Doctor, the idea of a universe of darkness doesn’t frighten me. I am the darkness.’

‘How very gothic. So tell me, how are you here?’ the Doctor asked. ‘If you’re just information, if all you are is the darkness or some vague cloud of malevolence or whatever you are, how can you be standing here in physical form? Where did you find the body?’

‘His name is Dolyn,’ said Missy. Everyone turned to her. She was still at the desk, reading from the same file she’d had earlier, but now she turned it around and showed a few of the animated pages. A small headshot of the Valeyard, or someone who looked very like him, featured in the top corner.

‘Junior Judicial Chambers,’ Missy read on. ‘Omega level security clearance. Upper first with distinction in temporal law from the Academy. Born in Soonwell Valley, spouse killed in the Vardan-Sontaran invasion. Two offspring, twins, currently in their first year of study at the Academy. Actually, didn’t you prosecute me for genocide a few regenerations back?’

‘I can’t say as I recall,’ replied the Valeyard.

‘So you actually are a lawyer?’ asked the Doctor. ‘Or at least you’re walking around inside the corpse of one.’

‘He isn’t dead,’ said the Valeyard, his tone almost indignant. ‘Not yet, at least. He was merely a temporary means of leaving Gallifrey. It would take far more energy than the body of one Time Lord possesses for us to completely merge.’

The Doctor was busily weighing up whether he believed this or not when the idea struck him. ‘I take it that’s why you wanted me dead at my trial? Why you made the High Council promise to give you my regenerations.’

‘The Doctor I intended to prosecute was only halfway through his life cycle. That should have been adequate to fully integrate myself with a physical form. A full, renewed set of regenerations, however, would be more than enough.’

‘Then it’s just a pity you made such an enormous hash of your plan, isn’t it?’

‘Did I, Doctor?’

The Doctor walked away. He could feel himself growing angry and knew that’s what the Valeyard wanted, so it was best to break away for a moment and calm himself down. He also suspected the Valeyard, like most predators, could sense his fear. Even after centuries of fighting evil, the Doctor had to admit that the darkness that scared him most was the one he felt now and then, tugging at him, urging him to just let go, stop caring so he wouldn’t have to feel the raw pain and anguish of loss any more. Standing there, talking to that hidden part of himself face to face was both fascinating and appalling.

‘So,’ Nardole began, sounding like a party guest who’d just sat through the hosts having a fight. ‘Any chance you might clue us in on what’s going on?’

‘Yeah,’ said Bill. ‘I mean, he tried to kill us. Be nice to know who he was at least.’

The Doctor sank down into the couch on the lower level with a sigh. The others all stayed by the desk, while the Valeyard lowered himself delicately to sit on a tubular steel chair beside the mirror and robe stand. With them all watching, waiting for his answer, the Doctor felt there should be a spotlight on him.

‘Many years ago,’ he began, ‘many lifetimes ago, literally, I was brought to this station and accused of breaking several fairly significant laws of my people.’

‘And had you?’ Bill asked.

The Doctor hesitated. ‘Well, yes, but that’s beside the point. The Time Lords at that time operated a policy of strict non-interference. They only wanted to observe. Sit about in their ivory towers and pass judgement on the rest of the universe without ever having seen it. I only wanted to be a part of things, that’s all, but that didn’t go down well with the High Council.

‘I was put on trial, but it became very clear that someone didn’t intend to play fair. Evidence was tampered with. The whole thing was odd, even for a Gallifreyan court. I realised eventually that it was all an elaborate plan by the High Council to discredit me and to get rid of me. They hired the Valeyard there to make sure I couldn’t win, not that he did a particularly good job of it.’

‘This is all fascinating, Doctor,’ the Valeyard replied.

‘But he’s you, isn’t that what he said?’ asked Bill. ‘Or part of you at least.’

The Doctor shrugged. ‘The main question, though, is what we do with him.’

‘Oh I think you’ll have far bigger questions than that,’ said the Valeyard, smirking. His whole demeanour had changed during the Doctor’s explanation.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ the Doctor asked.

Before any reply came, a light flashed beside the office door and a shrill buzzer cut through the room. Silence fell. Everyone, including the Doctor, stared at the doorway. Something shuffled outside, the subtle noise of someone standing there, waiting.

‘Thought you said it should be empty?’ asked Nardole in a low voice.

The Doctor held up a hand to signal them all to keep quiet. He approached the door, listening, but the sounds of movement beyond it continued. Steeling himself, he hit the control and opened the door.

A short, stocky man in a dark gold robe stood in the corridor outside, facing away from the door as if he’d been wandering on the spot while he waited. He wore a collar that looked strange and uncomfortable even by Time Lord standards, that formed a box around three sides of his head. The outfit was vaguely familiar. Then he turned and the Doctor noticed the large golden key hanging from a panel on the front of his robes.

The Keeper of the Matrix glowered at him, giving a very obvious head-to-toe look that lingered in particular over the Doctor’s ragged t-shirt.

‘Who the devil are you? Where’s the Valeyard?’

‘The Val…’ The Doctor’s hearts fell out of rhythm for a second. ‘Oh, bit tied up at the moment. I’m his… legal secretary. Can I help?’

‘Legal secretary?’ The Keeper looked incredulous, but gave a sort of shrug as if he expected strangeness and low standards of dress from the people he was forced to deal with. ‘Well, would you please remind him that if he wants my help with the new Matrix interface, then I shall be available for the next few hours. You might remind him also that there is a rather large amount of data to review, so it may not be the wisest course of action to leave it to the last minute. That is if he intends to have any actual evidence to take to the inquiry.’

‘Right,’ said the Doctor. ‘Just… so I can make sure he’s up to speed, which inquiry would that be?’

‘Are the High Council only employing imbeciles these days?’ replied the Keeper. ‘The inquiry we have all been dragged away from the comfort of our own homes to attend. Tell the Valeyard I have the Doctor’s files cued up and waiting, but he will have to be more specific as to the time and place he wants to draw the footage from. And do, please, impress upon him that I have other things to do besides wait around for him.’

‘I’ll let him know,’ the Doctor said.

The Keeper harrumphed and walked off and for a while the Doctor stayed there in the doorway, staring at the empty corridor where the other man had been. When he finally regained control of himself and returned to the office, he found the Valeyard laughing quietly.

‘Oh dear,’ said the Valeyard. ‘Something of a miscalculation?’

A mixture of panic, annoyance and dread twisted up inside the Doctor’s mind to produce a general pressure that made him want to scream, but he contained it, running his fingers through his unruly grey hair as he struggled to order his thoughts.

‘I said to land after the trial,’ he said, careful to control his tone.

Missy glanced up from the file she was still studying. ‘And I asked you three times what trial. You said put us down before the station blew up. That’s what I did. You didn’t tell me…’

‘You were there. The trial, you were…’ He sighed. ‘We need to get away from here, now, before we all start turning up.’

‘You’re going to turn up here again?’ Bill asked. ‘Like, another you?’

The Doctor nodded. ‘We’ll just have to find a safe spot to land and recalculate the way back. We can’t risk meeting ourselves. All it would take would be one small change in the timeline and things could come undone.’

‘It’s just you and him,’ said Missy. ‘Can’t we just hide you in a cupboard somewhere until it’s over?’

There was still no hint in her eyes or her expression that she was teasing him or lying. ‘Why don’t you remember any of this?’

‘Any of what?’

‘You said you’d never seen Glitz before. You said you’d never seen the Valeyard before. You don’t remember being here.’

He had an idea why that might be and it chilled him even more. Missy, or the Master as she’d been then, had been here, in the middle of it all, orchestrating parts of the trial for her, or his, own ends. It was equally possible, therefore, that the Master was here somewhere already. The Doctor knew himself how the disturbance in the timeline caused by two versions of himself meeting could play havoc with the memory.

‘I don’t know anything about your trial,’ Missy insisted. ‘Or this trial, anyway. I enjoyed some of the other ones. I’ve even got a couple on DVD. But this…’

‘We have to go,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s more than likely that he’s here already somewhere.’ He gestured towards the Valeyard.

‘Oh, I doubt that,’ said the Valeyard.

‘Oh, and why is that?’ asked the Doctor.

The Valeyard gave a shrug and put on an air of complete innocence. ‘I was gathering evidence on Ravalox when I was locked in that confession dial. This is the first time I’ve set foot on this station.’

‘That’s not possible.’

‘Why do you think my files and documents are all still here, all still intact? Sent ahead of me from Gallifrey. I fully intended to travel here after I had finished my reconnaissance, but I was… interrupted. When you so kindly, if inadvertently, released me from the dial, Doctor, I saw the opportunity to return and finish what I started. So you see you have no danger of meeting me again, as it were.’

The Doctor wanted badly to believe that none of this was happening. It was just a vivid dream, perhaps a simulation. Maybe he was still bleeding to death on the floor of the Nosferatu’s cargo hold and his brain was losing oxygen. The only problem was he could feel time around him gathering into a nexus point. It should have felt cold and solid where the timelines were fixed but there was movement now, a slight shudder through the fabric of the universe. He could easily imagine that shudder becoming an earthquake, tearing apart the strands of time that moved away from this day, this moment, until everything else unravelled. On the edge of his senses he heard the Valeyard laughing at him again but he pushed that aside and tried to calm the panicked voice inside his mind that just kept asking him what he was going to do.

‘Doctor, what’s the matter?’ Bill asked. ‘Tell me what’s going on and maybe I can help.’

‘I think it may be slightly beyond your capabilities,’ said the Valeyard.

‘Then another of your failings is your tendency to underestimate people,’ the Doctor retorted. Bill asked questions, he thought. She often asked the question that was so obvious he hadn’t thought of it, and it was usually just the one he needed. ‘We appear to have, as Mr Hyde over there says, miscalculated slightly.’

‘Bit of an understatement,’ muttered Missy. ‘And not my fault, I will say again.’

‘We’ve come to this station too early. The trial I told you about, my trial, is just about to start. Very shortly, my former self will arrive, and he should’ve come to face the Valeyard. Only somehow, it’s too early in the Valeyard’s timeline. He hasn’t done any of this yet.’

‘So, you’ve stopped the trial from happening,’ said Bill. ‘Isn’t that good thing? I mean, you said he tried to kill you.’

‘It’s not as simple as that,’ the Doctor went on. ‘That trial had its place in the order of things. One of the first pieces of evidence the Valeyard pulled up against me was of a visit I made to a planet called Ravalox. I’d gone there because the planet itself was identical in almost every way to Earth and I thought that strange. If it hadn’t been a couple of light years away from Earth’s position in space, I might’ve thought it was Earth, just from the readings. So I went for a look, and while I was there, I found out it was Earth after all. The Time Lords had moved it because they thought a group of Andromedan hackers had holed up there, downloading information from the Matrix, Gallifrey’s central computer system.’

‘They just moved the Earth?’ Bill asked, eyebrows raised in disbelief.

‘It had to be quarantined,’ said the Valeyard. ‘We couldn’t risk any more information being transferred.’

‘So you just stole a whole planet?’

The Valeyard shrugged. ‘It was only Earth.’

Bill stepped forward as if to punch him but the Doctor intercepted her.

‘The point is,’ he went on, ‘I found out what had happened because of the trial. The truth of what had happened to Earth came out because it had been brought up in evidence, otherwise I’d never have known that the Time Lords were responsible. But because the truth came out, the scandal raged across Gallifrey. The High Council were forced to return Earth to its proper place and allow its history to continue as it was meant to. If this trial doesn’t take place exactly as I remember it, I…he will never realise what was going on and Earth will remain hidden away, calling itself Ravalox, possibly for all eternity. The human colonists searching for their homeworld will never find it. The National Trust will never get their hands on it…’

‘There’s nothing about Ravalox in here,’ said Missy. She held up the file to show what she was talking about. ‘Says here they were going to bring up something about the planet Blath Gorum. Was that the one with the people with fish heads but they walked on two legs like a sort of reverse mermaid? Where you destroyed the entire…’

‘No one mentioned that,’ the Doctor interrupted. ‘Thankfully. He showed them Ravalox and then Thoros Beta, the planet I was on when they brought me here.’

Missy shook her head as she scanned the file again. ‘No Ravalox. Just a lot of dead mermaids.’

‘Why would they bring it up in evidence?’ Bill asked. ‘If it was such a big secret, why would they want to show everybody what they’d done. Isn’t that a bit stupid? Like, it’s like on some subconscious level he wanted you to know what was going on.’

The Doctor had taken to pacing back and forth across the upper level of the office but he paused as he came to the set of robes. Palms pressed together and his fingertips against his lips, he considered his own reflection in the mirror.

‘Of course,’ the Valeyard said, ‘there is a simple solution. You could let me go and I’ll carry on as planned. Time will play out just as you remember it.’

‘I’m not letting you loose to cause havoc out there,’ the Doctor replied.

‘You have no other choice, other than to do nothing and watch your precious Earth’s timeline be rewritten.’

‘You’ve got a plan, right, Doctor?’ Bill said. ‘So, what do we do?’

‘Oh yes, Doctor,’ said the Valeyard, ‘do tell us.’

‘Shut up,’ the Doctor snapped. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples, but could still feel them all behind him, watching him. He knew they were all waiting for an answer, but this time… this time he couldn’t see the way out. Letting the Valeyard go was as good as committing suicide and taking the rest of the universe with him. Keeping the Valeyard here and having the trial altered or cancelled entirely would end up more or less the same. There was no way out of this one that he could see. When he opened his eyes he found himself staring at his own reflection in the mirror, while the set of black and white robes hung on their stand in front him, also seeming to mock his lack of an answer. The positioning of the stand made it seem like his own reflection was actually wearing the robes from this angle. And then it hit him. Like the tumblers of a lock falling into place and clicking open, the idea appeared at the front of his brain.

‘Doctor?’ Nardole asked quietly.

‘For six regenerations,’ the Doctor began, ‘and over a thousand years, I have been afraid that one day I would look into a mirror and see the Valeyard looking back at me.’

He turned to face them, saw their expectant and worried expressions, but he couldn’t help himself. The Doctor began to laugh.


	6. The Trial of a Time Lord

The trial room on Zenobia had been designed to host to those cases the Time Lords preferred not to have on public view. So although there was some decoration, in the heavy brass tones of the Borussan period, it was nowhere near as ornate as the grand halls of law on Gallifrey itself. The jury, specially picked by the Lord President and all in their stiff collars and heavy robes, sat in parallel rows, two on each side of the room, on raked blocks of seating that looked down on the space where the trial itself would be played out. At one The dock sat empty at present and in darkness, the prosecutor’s dais directly opposite it, with the Inquisitor’s seat between the two.

The jury shuffled in their seats, moving slowly and carefully in the dim lighting. A few exchanged whispers, though these hurried conversations died quickly in the straight-backed silence of the chamber. The whole place had the nervous, expectant air of an auditorium awaiting the conductor’s appearance.

There was no applause, however, when the doors beside the dock finally burst open. A man stepped through, dressed in a long coat that was a patchwork of colours and patterns. He had a shock of blond curls and an expression tinged with curiosity, wariness and just a hint of annoyance.

‘At last, Doctor,’ said the prosecutor, sitting in the shadows at his desk. He closed the case notes he’d been reviewing, parts of which he’d been committing to memory, and watched the newcomer take in his surroundings.

The Doctor, the sixth incarnation of the Time Lord, sauntered down a few steps and leaned on the railing of the dock.

‘Am I late for something?’ he asked.

The Twelfth Doctor checked to make sure his perception filter was safely tucked out of sight beneath the black and white Valeyard’s robe, then reached over to his control panel to find the light switch.

‘I was beginning to fear you had lost yourself,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’

***

Missy fiddled with the monitor screen on the lower level of the Valeyard’s office until it flickered into life and showed an image of the trial room. Bill folded her arms, twisting up with nerves even though she wasn’t the one actually in there. She could just make out the Doctor’s head and shoulders - her Doctor’s head and shoulders - but he had his back to the camera.

‘You realise this will never work,’ said the Valeyard, seated on the sofa by the monitor, with his hands still bound. He regarded the image on screen with a sneer Bill was coming to think of as his signature expression, but she noticed the tightness in his jaw muscles. He was majorly pissed off, she thought. She’d seen a lot of people look that way when the Doctor managed to come up with a plan in the eleventh hour.

‘If this is to work,’ the Doctor had said to them before he left, ‘I’ll need your help. All of you.’

‘Me?’ Missy asked.

‘Yes, you. You don’t remember any of this, which means there’s a good chance you were never here. Or that you’re not here. Which means the Master I remember seeing…’

‘Was her,’ Bill put in.

‘Everything will have to be exact,’ said the Doctor. ‘Like clockwork. Otherwise we risk letting me know what’s going on too soon, or worse still, the Time Lords fidning out what we’re up to. Either way, if we fail and these events don’t play out as I remember them, the damage to the timeline could be catastrophic.’

Bill had gone over her instructions a dozen times, but although she understood exactly what she was supposed to do, it didn’t stop her being full of anxious energy that made it impossible to stand still too long. Nardole, meanwhile, had written his orders down and was seated at the Valeyard’s desk, scrutinising them. Or trying to decipher his own handwriting, maybe. First time he’d left a note for Bill in the Doctor’s office back on Earth, she hadn’t even known what language it was written in.

‘By order of the High Council,’ said the Doctor on screen, ‘this is an impartial inquiry into the behaviour of the accused person, known as the Doctor, who is charged that he, on diverse occasions, has been guilty of conduct unbecoming a Time Lord.’

‘Not guilty!’ shouted the man in the dock, getting to his feet. Bill couldn’t get her head around the fact that this was also the Doctor. He was nothing like the man she knew. This one was dressed like some sort of children’s entertainer in yellow trousers and a tartan waistcoat, all beneath that bizarre coat. He looked like a sulky child, but Bill figured she should forgive him that. Anyone would be a bit moody if they’d been dragged out of time and put on trial, she supposed.

‘He is also charged with, on diverse occasions,’ the Doctor – her Doctor, continued, ‘transgressing the First Law. It is my unpleasant task, Madam Inquisitor, to prove to the inquiry that the Doctor is an incorrigible meddler in the affairs of other peoples and planets.’

‘See,’ said Missy, shaking her head, never write your evil speeches down. Gloating about your plans is bad enough, but you’ve gone that wee step further.’

‘The lawyer wrote this,’ said the Valeyard haughtily. ‘I merely repurposed his script.’

‘Inquisitor,’ the Doctor continued, ‘I am not proposing to waste the time of the court by dwelling in detail on the activities of the accused.’

‘Good,’ said the other-Doctor on screen, the Valeyard and Missy in unison.

‘Instead, I intend to adumbrate two typical instances from separate epistopic interfaces of the spectrum. These examples of the criminal behaviour of the accused are fully recorded in the Matrix, the repository of all knowledge.’

‘You could’ve edited the script a bit,’ Bill muttered.

‘If you need me to explain any of the big words, just ask,’ the Valeyard replied. He glanced over his shoulder at her and gave a murderous look, but Bill just stared him out until he turned back to the screen.

‘I should like to begin,’ said the Doctor, ‘with the Doctor’s involvement in the affairs of Ravalox, a planet in the Stellian galaxy.’

On screen, the Doctor sat down, hit some control or other his desk, and the trial room lights dimmed like a cinema’s. The Time Lords on the right hand side and the Inquisitor all swivelled in their seats and craned upwards, as the large screen on the back wall came to life.

‘Well,’ said Missy, ‘here we go. Anybody bring popcorn?’

The Matrix screen, the only thing now clearly visible on the monitor, showed a patch of woodland, misty with rainfall. Everything about it looked autumnal, cold, crisp and damp. A carpet of leaves lay around the roots of the mostly skeletal trees. The Sixth Doctor strode into view, crunching the mulch and loam underfoot while a young woman with dark hair turned out in a style that was fashionable on Earth in the mid-1980s, clung to his arm. It wasn’t so much a gesture of affection as an attempt to get beneath the cover of the multicoloured golf umbrella the Doctor carried.

‘I don’t think I like Ravalox very much,’ said the girl. From her accent, Bill guessed she was American. What had the Doctor called her? Peri something? ‘Reminds me of a wet November back on Earth.’

‘Now that’s part of the reason why we’re here,’ replied the Doctor.

‘Huh?’

‘Well, Ravalox has the same mass, angle of tilt and period of rotation as Earth.’ He illustrated his last point by twirling the umbrella. Peri grabbed his arm and pulled until they were both under cover again.

‘So?’ she asked,

‘Well I thought that was quite interesting. It’s unusual to find two planets so similar. In fact, it’s quite a phenomenon.’

***

From his seat in the trial room, the Keeper of the Matrix watched the scenes play out on screen with a growing sense of dread. He’d wrung his velvet robes so tightly in his hands that they were now streaked dark with sweat. He tried to catch the Valeyard’s eye, but the man was in shadow over by his desk, hunched over his notes by the look of it, and scribbling every now and then on a pad of neon orange paper. The Keeper had only gone into the trial to be sure the Matrix screen was working properly after its upgrade, but after the Valeyard’s opening gambit he had stayed, telling himself that there had to be a reason for this, that the Valeyard had chosen to bring that particular planet to the court’s attention for some other reason unrelated to their own involvement in Project Ravalox. He kept waiting for it all to become clear, and for the churning sensation in his gut to fade away. After ten minutes, however, all he could think was that the Valeyard had betrayed them. He was on the Castellan’s side. He wanted the prophecies made public, to cause a panic. Perhaps he was one of the Flavians who wanted to destabilise the Lord President. Who knew? But whatever the reason, this was not going to plan and he was the one the High Council had put on the ground, right in the middle of it all. He was the one they’d blame when they found out, unless he could get his word in first.

When he was sure no one was looking his way, the Keeper slipped out of the trial room, then hurried along the corridors until he found a quiet corner. He tapped the comms unit on his wrist and muttered, ‘Come on, come on,’ until finally one of the High Council’s many clerks answered.

‘Let me speak to the Lord President,’ he demanded.

The display on the unit turned blue-white as he was put on hold, then there was a crackle of static and the Lord President’s face appeared.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

‘We may have a problem,’ said the Keeper. ‘Valeyard whatever-his-name-is appears to have abandoned our plan. I believe he’s been compromised, sir.’

Even in the washed-out picture on the comms unit’s tiny screen, the Keeper saw the President’s face pale.

‘What’s he doing?’

‘Telling the entire court and a jury of highly influential Time Lords about Ravalox, sir.’

The Lord President swore. ‘Can you stop him?’

‘Without drawing even more attention to what he’s doing? I can halt the Matrix playback, perhaps feign an error, but it will look suspicious. I may be able to redact any mention of Gallifrey from the testimony, but…’

‘Do it,’ said the President. ‘And then go back to the trial. Keep an eye on our friend in black and tell me if he tries anything else.’

‘Lord President.’

The Keeper switched off his comms and turned to walk away, only to collide painfully with a Chancellery guard striding along in the opposite direction. Panic seized him and he waited to feel a staser blast or a knife between his ribs. Was this one of the Valeyard’s, or the Castellan’s men? Then he realised the guard was flustering around him, holding his arm not to restrain him but to stop him from tumbling over onto the floor. As he straightened and smoothed down his robes, he got a good look at the guard at last. A young woman, looking nervous. Probably a new recruit. Had she heard his conversation? Would she understand even if she had? If she was a recruit, her security clearance would be virtually non-existant. Just here to fetch and carry for the important Time Lords, the Keeper told himself. Reassured, he huffed out a sigh and tried to look as imposing as he was able.

‘Why don’t you look where you’re going, young woman?’ he demanded.

The guard – actually, he found it quite hard to concentrate on the details of her face – finished straightening her white cloak and stood to attention.

‘I’m so sorry, My Lord. It won’t happen again.’

‘I should hope not.’

The Keeper continued on his way. After a few steps, he found he’d almost forgotten the guard completely.

***

Bill watched the little man in his weird outfit for any signs he might have seen through the perception filter, but the Keeper just gave her one last glare then stomped away down the corridor. She allowed herself a sigh of relief. That was one bit over with at least.

She brought out a long, cuboid device from beneath the cloak of her guard’s uniform and checked the readouts that glowed along one face of it.

‘Object scanned,’ it read, showing a 3D wire model of the old fashioned key the Keeper had been wearing on his robes. ‘Send to printer, Y/N?’

She hit the button that confirmed the request, then hurried back to the Valeyard’s office to see if the TARDIS’s printer had finished the job yet.

***

The Doctor tore a sheet off the neon-orange pad he’d found in the Valeyard’s office and set it down on a pile of similar notes he’d already scribbled, while above him on the Matrix screen, his former self bumbled about on Ravalox, or Earth, or whichever name you chose to call it, getting captured and escaping only to be captured again. He found himself actually watching some of the footage now and then. Had he really been that loud and pompous? It was like finding old poetry he’d written in his teens, made him cringe, but he had to keep his focus. Between the Valeyard Dolyn’s notes for the original inquiry and his own memory of the trial, he thought he had a good idea now of what had to happen, where to stop the film and point things out that really didn’t need pointed out but that might just prod his other self’s suspicions enough to show him something weird was going on. Once or twice he’d tried to read the other Doctor, who was leaning back in his chair in the dock, legs crossed, hands clasped on his lap as if he hadn’t a care, but pretty much as soon as the Sixth Doctor stumbled out of his TARDIS onto Zenobia and come into the trial room, he had flung up his mental defences.

The Doctor felt a faint vibration against his leg and reached beneath his robes to fetch his mobile phone from his pocket. Keeping it hidden beneath his desk, he read the message that flashed up on screen.

_From: Bill. Got the key. Missy working on computer thing now. Waiting for you._

That was something, he supposed. Every second that progressed when they weren’t caught out, every time the Inquisitor addressed him and didn’t see through his disguise, was a plus. He really wanted to believe that this would all work perfectly and everything was going to be fine. But there were so many variables. Relying on Missy for this plan to work wasn’t exactly ideal for starters.

On screen, a much younger Glitz and one of his associates hurried through the corridors of a high-tech underground structure beneath the ruined surface of Ravalox.

‘Anyway, Dibber,’ said Glitz, ‘if we should run into the Doctor again…’

‘We shoot him.’

‘Not a bad idea, lad. But whatever you do, don’t open your big pie-hole and let him know we’re after the stuff from…’

A warning tone shrieked across the footage and on instinct, the Doctor hit the pause button on his panel. He remembered this vaguely. The stuff had been edited. But it occurred to him then that he had put together this evidence himself, not the Valeyard or the High Council. So who had tampered with it? Still, he grew aware that the Inquisitor, the other Doctor and indeed the whole courtroom was staring at him, waiting for an explanation. He stood up and put on his best Valeyard-ish air of nonchalant superiority.

‘The remainder of that evidence has been excised, my lady,’ he said.

‘Excised?’ asked the Inquisitor. He’d forgotten how intimidating she was, sitting there in her white and blood-red robes. ‘Why?’

Your guess is as good as mine, the Doctor thought, but I’d say because someone’s spotted what I’m trying to do and doesn’t want it going any further.

‘By order of the High Council,’ he said. After all, it was probably true.

‘This is a judicial inquiry appointed by the High Council but independently conducted. It is my duty, Valeyard, to decide what evidence is relevant.’

Nothing on Gallifrey was independent of the High Council, thought the Doctor. But this was actually quite good, he realised, glancing over at the dock. The other Doctor was intrigued and taking notice.

‘Of course, my lady. The High Council simply felt that certain areas of testimony should not be revealed.’

‘Why not?’

‘Against the public interest,’ he said, adding in a quieter voice, ‘I should think.’

She protested a little more. Whatever was going on, the Doctor thought, she wasn’t in on it. That was interesting. He hadn’t been entirely sure before.

‘Do you wish to lodge an official objection at this stage, Doctor?’ she asked.

‘Well I, er…’ the other Doctor began. He looked straight over at the prosecutor’s dais and for a moment the Doctor thought his former self might actually have recognised him, but his mental barriers were still up and they worked both ways. The Doctor couldn’t contact his former self telepathically but likewise, the other Doctor couldn’t sense him either.

‘No, ma’am,’ he said at length. ‘No, let the Valeyard here continue. Give him enough rope to hang himself, eh?’

He gave an overly smug smile that looked ridiculous now, seeing it from the outside. Thank goodness he’d acquired a bit of style with age, the Doctor thought. But he was sure now the seeds of doubt were stuck in his other self’s mind and hopefully wouldn’t take too long to germinate. He sat back down and restarted the Matrix playback.

***

Bill watched as Missy fiddled with a control panel beneath a bank of monitors that reminded her of a TV production gallery. Most were dark, but one showed the footage being shown to the trial room. On screen, the Doctor in his insane outfit walked along the shore of a flamingo pink ocean that was so bright it hurt to look at it for too long.

‘I can’t get over how weird this place is,’ said the American girl following after the Doctor. Her outfit was almost as loud as the Doctor’s and definitely in the same 1980s cocktail bar colour scheme as the planet. Bill knew the Doctor had travelled with people before. It’s not like she was jealous or she thought she was the only one, but it was weird to see one of them. With this completely alien version of the Doctor, too, it was like finding a whole new chapter of someone’s life when you thought you’d finally started to understand them.

‘Hm? Yes, I suppose it is,’ the Doctor replied.

‘Difficult to believe there’s any industry here.’

‘Ugh, the delightful Miss Perpugillium Brown,’ said Missy from beneath a mass of wires, then she added with heavy sarcasm, ‘Haven’t missed that voice.’

She pulled out a handful of cables and squinted at their ends, then tossed them aside and dropped to the floor beneath the console, where she opened a flap on its underside and began prodding at the wiring in there. A lot of grunts and what sounded like curse words came from beneath the desk.

‘You all right?’ Bill asked. ‘Sure you know what you’re doing?’

‘Are you still here?’ She appeared from behind the desk and blew a curl of hair out of her face. ‘And I’ll have you know, I got a first in Matrix hardware engineering. I built one of these in my bedroom when I was a little boy.’ She sighed and Bill heard clanks and clatters as she raked around amongst her tools. ‘I need a panatropic cell drive adapter. Our intrepid hero should have one in his TARDIS.’

‘What does it look like?’ Bill asked, secretly glad to have the excuse to leave for a while.

‘Ask the baldy one.’

‘Fine,’ Bill said under her breath. She checked her perception filter was still clipped to her borrowed guard’s uniform and headed out of the control room. She made a mental note to ask why the Doctor had one of these uniforms in his wardrobe, then decided it wasn’t the weirdest thing she’d found in there.

This station seemed to be made entirely of corridors and they all looked alike. She had walked for about five minutes when the nagging feeling began that she was lost. Time Lords didn’t go in for signs either. She turned and retraced her steps back to the last junction. She rounded the corner and walked straight into a tall man in the uniform of the Chancellery Guard. She froze, lowered her gaze, then sidled past him with a muttered apology. Once she was at the end of the hallway, she risked a glance over her shoulder. The guard was just standing there, watching her with narrowed eyes. Something about his gaze made her shiver. Not only did she believe he could see through the perception filter, she thought he might be able to see right into her soul. He wore a silver breastplate over his uniform, so did that make him the one in charge? Maybe he knew all his soldiers’ faces. Best not to hang around and give him a chance to realise he hadn’t seen her before. Bill quickened her pace and prayed she’d see the door to the Valeyard’s office around the next corner, and that the guard wouldn’t follow.

When she finally found a stretch of corridor she recognised and saw the door up ahead, she let out the breath she’d been holding and hurried inside. There was no sign of Nardole. The Valeyard was still on the couch with his attention fixed on the monitor screen. For a brief, panicked moment, she imagined the Valeyard quietly shooting Nardole as soon as they were alone, but then she noticed the TARDIS door was ajar and heard clatters inside. She followed the sounds into the console room and spotted Nardole on the upper gallery.

‘Missy says she needs a panatropic cell drive adapter, or something like that,’ she called up. ‘She said you’d know what it is.’

‘What did her last slave die of?’ answered Nardole.

‘Her, probably.’

Nardole shook his head and went off through one of the upper doorways. She heard him rummaging in tool boxes and cupboards in the distance. When he didn’t return after a few minutes, she wandered back to the TARDIS door and looked out into the office. It didn’t feel right, somehow, to leave the Valeyard out there by himself, however calm and resigned he looked, not that she could do much if he did decide to make a break for it.

He didn’t pay her any attention but she was sure he knew she was there. Every time she looked at him, though, Bill remembered that throwaway comment earlier. ‘Even poor old Bill’. She knew it was probably just meant to wind her up. Even if it wasn’t, these were people who time travelled. It was possible he did know what happened to her in the end but did she really want to know? Did it matter anyway? Everybody had to die sometime. Just, she had always hoped she’d get there when she was ninety after a scandalous old age, maybe spent with someone special. Could anyone really blame her for wanting to know?

She bit her lip, then strode across to the couch and placed herself between the Valeyard and the monitor, right in his line of sight. He looked up, trying to appear bored, she thought, though she could still see the calculating look behind his eyes.

‘What did you mean?’ she asked.

‘This conversation might progress more smoothly with the help of some specifics.’

‘It might progress better if you can leave off the sarcasm for a minute.’

‘Probably beyond my abilities,’ he muttered with a faint and humourless smile.

‘What did you mean you’d seen what happened to me?’

He sighed and stared off at some vague spot on the floor. ‘I have seen what happens to all of them.’

‘How?’

‘What does it matter?’

‘I want to understand. I want to know what you are, how you’re connected to him.’

‘You couldn’t begin to comprehend…’

Bill moved around until she was in his sightline again. ‘Try me.’

The Valeyard sighed. ‘Every Time Lord has a connection to the Matrix, even if most of them are unaware of it on a daily basis. The Matrix monitors them through the same style of telepathic link that exists between a Time Lord and his TARDIS. When they die, that connection allows the computer to upload an entire brain scan and the Time Lord can actually become part of the system.’

‘So?’

‘So, that link exists regardless of where a Time Lord happens to be in time and space, though there are protocols in the APC net that stop information from any relative future timelines from leaking backwards into the current time frame. The system sees everything that ever was and everything that ever will be, but it allows Gallifrey only to see what has happened relative to its current timeline, unless it encounters something particularly strong in the future, something with a considerable impact. A great disaster, for example. Or a war. That can then seep back, but usually comes out as a fairly vague prophecy. I was a part of the system but my information was kept isolated from the rest of the APC net. I was composed of quarantined data from the Doctor’s experiences but the Matrix didn’t see the need to differentiate between things that had happened relative to that point in Gallifrey’s history and things that would happen in the future. It was all just dangerous and disruptive information.’

‘So you know everything that’s going to happen to him?’

The Valeyard shook his head. ‘Not everything. My knowledge is only fragmentary. I am limited to those experiences the Matrix deemed unsavoury and a little of the surrounding context, that’s all.’

‘You mean you only remember the horrible stuff?’

‘That’s one way of putting it.’

Bill waited for a moment but he didn’t elaborate. He’d looked away again, avoiding her gaze.

‘But you knew who I was as soon as you saw me. So you remember me. You know what happened… what happens to me.’

‘What possible purpose would it serve you to know?’

She crouched on her haunches so she was level with him. ‘None. Nothing. I don’t know. But you can’t just say to someone you know how they’re gonna die. Wouldn’t you want to know?’

‘I didn’t say I saw you die.’

A moment of silence passed. A lump of ice formed in the pit of Bill’s stomach.

‘Just tell me. I mean, maybe I can do something about it, if I know.’

He was unsure. She could see that in his eyes and in the way he took so long to finally reply.

‘I mentioned that the Matrix often produced prophecies,’ he began. ‘When I… when _the Doctor_ was very young, it produced one that concerned him directly. I doubt he’s told you that. He rarely confides in those he drags into his chaos. Over the centuries, of course, the Matrix produced enough visions about the Doctor to fill an entire section of the Capitol Library, but that first prediction… it told of the Doctor’s final battle and his death. It said he would fall on the fields of Trenzalore, his last stand. Knowing that,I… _he_ spent most of his life trying to avoid that planet, doing everything he could to change the future the Matrix had shown him.’ He turned to her and gave a cold smile. ‘So tell me, where do you suppose he was when he regenerated into his current persona?’

‘But he’s alive,’ Bill said. ‘He didn’t die. So it wasn’t right. It doesn’t have to be the way the Matrix says it is.’

‘My point is, knowing what Time has in store presents us with the temptation to try and alter fate, sometimes to the point of obsession. We rail and protest and try to writhe out of it’s grasp, only to find ourselves right where Time intended us to be. And ask yourself, what has been wasted in the process? Would you rather spend your days with the Doctor afraid that one day the TARDIS doors will open and you’ll find yourself in the place I described to you as being the scene of your demise? Would you want to spend those days working out increasingly convoluted schemes to try and save yourself? Or would you rather live?’

Bill considered the point and realised with a slight pang of surprise that she agreed with him. More alarming was the fact that he was looking at her directly now. At first, she’d thought the anger she saw flaring up in his eyes was just aimed at her and the Doctor in general for spoiling his plans, but studying him this close up, she wasn’t so sure that was right. He was doing his best to hide it but to Bill it seemed more like anger flowering up from an injustice, an indignant fury like she felt so often, like she’s felt just that… however long ago it was since she had been in the university. It was anger, yes, but it was anger that came from pain.

Behind her, she heard Nardole clear his throat and turned to find him glowering at her from the TARDIS doorway. It was enough to break the spell. Feeling like she’d been caught someone off-limits, she scrambled to her feet and headed over to him, taking the small piece of equipment he offered.

‘Right, better get back to it, I suppose,’ she said. She tried to smile, but didn’t quite manage it.

‘Be careful,’ Nardole said quietly, with a pointed look towards the Valeyard.

‘I know,’ she whispered back. ‘I wasn’t friending him on Facebook or anything, just asking a question.’

‘Although I’ll happily tell you what happens to Nardole,’ the Valeyard called over his shoulder to them. ‘Frightful, really. All that screaming…’

‘You don’t scare me,’ Nardole told him.

‘Yes, I do,’ the Valeyard replied. His air of smug superiority was back and he was smirking at them again. ‘And really, ask yourself why that should be. After all, everything I am composed of is present, at least in some potential form, in him. Your precious Doctor. If you’re afraid of me, what does that say about him?’

Nardole glared and folded his arms. Bill gave him a pat on the shoulder in a show of solidarity then made for the door.

‘You shouldn’t wait for him,’ the Valeyard called after her. She paused and looked back, but he was still avoiding her gaze. ‘That’s all I’ll say.’

Bill realised her pulse was thudding in her ears. She found Nardole staring at her with an expression of concern. She forced a smile and tapped the computer chip against her palm.

‘Best get back before Missy destroys something,’ she said. ‘This station’s supposed to blow up soon, after all.’

When the office doors slid shut behind her, she leaned against them and closed her eyes. Her heart kept beating like a trapped bird in a cage but she told herself she couldn’t let the fear get in her way. There was too much to do. And she could handle whatever the universe threw at her. She nodded, shook herself to regain her composure, then started back towards the Matrix control room, hoping that if she repeated these mantras enough, she might actually start believing them.

***

Captain Petturi of the Chancellery Guard stepped into the tiny office he’d been allocated on Zenobia, locked the door and activated the computer display on his desk. He scrolled through the list of guards sent with him to the station. Each one had been selected by the Castellan and Petturi thought he’d read the files on all of them, but he hadn’t recognised the woman in the corridor. A quick glance at the list and he was certain. With a sigh, he leaned on the desk, thought over the possibilities, how someone new could have made it onto the station. It was possible that one of the jury or even the Inquisitor had brought along personal protection and managed to avoid submitting the proper paperwork, but he doubted it. Petturi prided himself on his thoroughness.

He considered calling Gallifrey to ask the Castellan for advice but paused before hitting the comms app. Petturi had hoped his involvement in this affair would be the highlight of his career, something that might even be the first step towards the Castellan’s chair. No, he thought, whatever was going on here, he would deal with it himself.

Heading back into the labyrinth of corridors, he returned to the spot near the Matrix sub-control room where he’d seen the unknown guard, and sure enough, he reached the junction of two hallways and spotted her up ahead, leaving the Valeyard’s office. So if she was working for anyone, it was the prosecutor. That made sense, he admitted. There was something very odd about that Valeyard. On Gallifrey he’d been a little unnerving, although Petturi had only seem him at a distance. Here, there was just something off about him, but the captain couldn’t put his finger on what it was. He’d watched the trial via the monitors in his office, in between his patrols of the station and couldn’t fathom what was going on at all. He could sense there was some plan or other beneath the events but it was just beyond his grasp and that irritated him.

He followed the young guard, just out of curiosity. Perhaps if he could figure out what she was doing that might give a hint as to the Valeyard’s plan. By the looks of things she was headed back to that little sub-control room, which neither she nor her master had any business being near. Were they fiddling the evidence somehow like the Doctor claimed? Petturi hesitated at that thought. If that was the case, then was it not also possible that his superior, the Castellan, and indeed the High Council were in on it as well? Then they wouldn’t take too kindly to his interfering.

He watched the girl go into the control room and then he wandered past, just on the off chance he might hear some conversation inside, but the door was heavily shielded to protect the instruments inside, too thick to allow voices to leak out. He considered knocking, giving a generic excuse like he was doing a security sweep or something like that, just so he could see what was going on, but before he could pick a reason for intruding, he spotted movement at the far end of the corridor. An old man in the black and white robes of a court defender had turned a corner from another hallway, halted on seeing him, then darted off the way he’d come, all in a rapid flurry of movement. Petturi frowned and strode along to the bend in the corridor. The old man was only a few yards further down the next stretch, shuffling along as if every step was an effort. He’d moved quickly enough a second ago, though.

‘Excuse me, My Lord,’ Petturi called out. ‘Is everything all right?’

The old man turned and smiled at him. ‘Oh? Oh yes, quite, quite. Just… I find this station’s layout rather confusing, that’s all. Would you be able to point me in the direction of the Valeyard’s office, young man?’

‘You were headed in the right direction the first time,’ Petturi said, with a nod over his shoulder. ‘It’s back that way.’

The defender smiled and nodded and started to creep slowly along the corridor towards him, muttering thanks, but Petturi stayed where he was, one hand resting on the holstered staser weapon at his hip.

‘He won’t be there, though,’ he told the old man.

The defender stopped and blinked up at him with cloudy blue eyes. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘The court’s still in session,’ said Petteri. ‘The Valeyard’s in the trial room.’

‘Of course he is, yes, stupid of me.’

The alarms ringing in Petturi’s mind grew louder. He’d started his career patrolling the streets of the Capitol and seen enough people loitering and acting suspiciously to recognise the signs.

‘I was told Lord Kalpea was assigned to defend the Doctor,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe I was informed of a change of plans, Lord…’

‘Metraseth,’ said the old man. ‘No, no, it was very much a last-minute arrangement. Lord Kalpea was indisposed. But, since the Doctor insists on defending himself, I suppose it doesn’t really matter which of us was sent here, does it?’

‘It does to me. I should’ve been informed. There are procedures in place for…’

‘Well,’ interrupted Metraseth, ‘I expect the High Council simply overlooked it in the frenzy of things. This is a somewhat unusual trial, after all. I have my orders from the Halls of Law in my quarters, if you wish to inspect my credentials, Captain.’

Petturi took a moment to think. Everything about the defender was odd, somehow, but then he could just be another weird old Time Lord who should’ve regenerated centuries ago. Or this might be his final life and he was determined to make it last, even if he ended up senile in the process. Petturi, though not without influence in the Capitol, was all too aware that he was offworld, and in the realms of these lawyers and the High Council’s plotting.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ he said, with what he hoped was a slightly more deferential tone. ‘I’ll check with the Halls of Law myself and find out why they didn’t think it necessary to tell us you were coming.’

‘You do that, Captain, you do that.’

Petturi watched as Metraseth shuffled away along the corridor, evidently having given up his errand for now.

***

The Doctor checked his notes again, but he knew exactly where they were now in the stage of things. This was one of the points he remembered far too clearly, and he braced himself to see it again, even if he was on the outside now.

On screen, in an advanced laboratory full of wires and harsh, bright lights, his old friend Peri sat up and swung her legs over the side of a medical couch. Her head was completely shaved and her expression had lost all of its usual warmth and expression. When she spoke, her voice was low pitched and resonated oddly, the voice of the alien mind that had replaced her own.

‘Protect me, I am your lord and master!’ she cried.

Her appearance and response stopped the intruders who had broken into the lab in their tracks. King Yrcanos of the Kronteb looked momentarily bewildered, but kept both hands on the phaser weapon he had brought to wreak havoc against the scientists here. Rage soon overtook bemusement and he fired indiscriminately around the lab. Eventually the picture was just a blur of white light and the Doctor, sickened by the scenes even though he knew, in his rational mind, that they were all false, switched off the screen. He had not been looking forward to this part, and again tried to nudge a little bit of contact from his former self, if even just to suggest that this hadn’t been the truth. The other Doctor had lowered his guard a little but only as his anger and grief pushed away his reason for a moment. It still formed a wall between them and the Doctor was unable to break through.

‘You killed Peri,’ the Sixth Doctor said, sounding too stunned even to be outraged.

‘We had to act,’ said the Inquisitor. ‘With the discovery that Crozier had made, the whole course of natural evolution throughout the universe would be affected.’

The Doctor wondered if the Valeyard had come up with that one. He had a memo attached to his trial documents that detailed the supposed reasoning for taking the other Doctor out of his own time stream at that particular point. The High Council’s excuse had been that the Doctor had stumbled onto experiments on Thoros Beta that had extreme potential consequences for life in the universe, but surely only an idiot would believe that? Gallifrey’s modus operandi in this period was non-interference, so why would they bother with Thoros Beta, or even with the universe for that matter? So long as no one actually tried to experiment with the minds of Time Lords, the Doctor doubted anyone in the current High Council would even care. And surely, he thought, his other self must know that as well.

‘But Peri died, Doctor,’ he said, steeling himself, ‘because you abandoned her. We had to end her life because your negligence had made it impossible for her to live.’

 _I am lying,_ he tried to broadcast to himself. _She is still alive. Will you please listen, you stubborn old idiot?_

He recoiled, mentally, as he felt a tiny crack in the other Doctor’s defences. A tiny part of that had actually gone through, he felt sure of it, but his other self had thrown the wall back up right away so it was hard to tell how much, if anything, he’d been able to get across.

‘Lies,’ the Sixth Doctor said. ‘There’s something else going on here.’

 _Took you long enough_ , thought the Doctor. He really wanted to grin, but knew that would be out of character.

‘The High Council had no right to order Peri’s, or anyone else’s death.’

‘Please, Doctor,’ said the Inquisitor.

 _Yes,_ the Doctor projected, _I’m lying, and you want to know why, don’t you?_

‘No,’ said his other self. ‘I was taken out of time for another reason, and I have every intention of finding out what it is.’

 _Well done_ , thought the Doctor.

The Inquisitor sighed. ‘I fail to see the usefulness in debating the motives or otherwise of the High Council when neither of us, Doctor, are privy to that information. Valeyard, will you please proceed with your evidence. We are rapidly running out of time for this session.’

‘That concludes the evidence for the prosecution, Sagacity,’ said the Doctor.

The Inquisitor raised a neat, dark eyebrow. ‘That is your entire submission? I cannot guarantee that I shall allow any other contributions from your dais at a later point…’

‘The prosecution rests,’ the Doctor said again. ‘I’m quite sure. I’ve said all I need to say.’

She looked unconvinced, but the Doctor suspected her jibe about the session dragging on came from a desire to get to her temporary quarters and hit a bottle of Rassilon’s Red, so he didn’t expect too much of an argument.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘In that case, I think the most sensible course of action is to adjourn to allow the Doctor to compile his defence. Doctor, do you still insist upon rejecting the services of the court defender? Lord Kalpea is still on the station, in case…’

‘I do, Ma’am,’ replied the other Doctor. His tone was dire, almost a warning.

‘Then we shall reconvene at zero-nine-hundred hours tomorrow. This court is now adjourned.’

Everyone present in the trial room rose as the Inquisitor made her way out. The Doctor gathered up the pile of torn bits of neon paper and his files, keeping his gaze lowered so his other self wouldn’t get a good look at him. So far, so good, he thought, though watching as the Sixth Doctor was ushered out, he knew that the worst was still ahead.


	7. Recess

Bill paced around a small foyer just outside the trial room, listening to the muffled voices coming through the ornate brass doors. She could barely make out who was speaking, let alone what they were saying, but she did notice the sudden surge in the noise level and several sets of footsteps coming towards her. She straightened, standing to attention with her back to the wall in the hope she’d look like she was guarding something. The doors opened inwards and two actual guards strode out. Bill froze and prayed that the perception filter was still working. But the guards just marched past, and in their wake came the judge woman in her white dress and red sash. She didn’t even look in Bill’s direction. She had the bearing of somebody who wouldn’t look at a mere guard unless she actually needed something and even then she’d be reluctant. A couple of others she knew only as faces on the monitors followed, then finally she saw the Doctor and allowed herself to let go of the breath she’d been holding.

He gave a subtle nod to her to tell her to come with him and she fell into step at his side. To the rest of the station, they should look like the Valeyard and his bodyguard, she hoped, and also thought it was a little bit true at the same time. But then he leaned in closer and whispered in her ear.

‘Just keep walking.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t react, just keep walking.’

‘Why?’

He straightened as they turned a corner and left the foyer, coming out into a long corridor. Heading towards them from the opposite direction was the other one, the other Doctor, flanked by two guards.

‘Oh,’ she muttered, understanding at last. She kept her head high and her shoulders back, walking in the most soldier-like manner she could, and fought the temptation to look up into the face of the other Doctor as he passed. She really wanted to see him close up, even to speak to him, just to see if it would feel the same as talking to her Doctor. When he saw them, though, his expression hardened. She saw the distrust and dislike in his eyes and had to remind herself that to him, they were just two more people trying to set him up. She felt the Doctor tense beside her but remembered his warning and tried not to look at him either.

There corridor wasn’t wide enough for both groups to pass each other comfortably. Bill wondered who’d flinch first. The Doctor didn’t slow his pace, even when they were barely a foot away from his other self, and then instead of stepping aside, he shouldered his way past. The other Doctor stopped dead and spun around, mouth agape and brow furrowed.

‘Now just a minute!’ he called after them, but as the Doctor had instructed, Bill just kept walking. The Doctor beside her didn’t slow down for a second. Soon they were at the far end of the corridor where it curved around a corner. Just as they were about to turn, Bill risked a glance over her shoulder. The other Doctor was still standing there, glaring after them, but his frown had lost a little of its anger. He seemed more confused than indignant now. Finally one of his escorts tapped him on the arm and shepherded him on again. By then, Bill and the Doctor had turned the corner out of sight.

‘What was that about?’ Bill asked.

The Doctor grinned. ‘Just a bit of forward planning.’

***

The Sixth Doctor found himself herded along the corridor to a set of doors at the top of a shallow flight of steps. The Chancellery guard sent to escort him – or more likely to shoot him if he tried to escape – opened the door and stepped aside.

‘I take it I am expected to go in?’ the Doctor asked.

The guard glanced at him but didn’t reply. Every time he returned to Gallifrey, or its outposts for that matter, the Doctor wondered if he would step out of his TARDIS and feel a pang of nostalgia for the place but every time, he found himself reminded of why he left in the first place. He strode into the room, made a big show of appraising it, wandering full circle around the empty space in the middle before inspecting the cases of books and turning on the interactive surface of the desk to see just how much computing power he’d been allowed. The answer was, of course, less than a pocket calculator. He did, however, have a notepad. They had allowed him that much. No pen, of course. Maybe they thought he’d try to stab someone with it. He returned to the doorway and glowered at the guard.

‘Do you really expect me to work in here?’ he asked. ‘The Valeyard had access to the Matrix. How exactly am I to compose a rebuttal of his evidence without the same access.’

‘The Keeper will see you shortly, sir,’ said the guard, sounding bored. He reached in and closed the door, sealing the Doctor in.

‘Charming,’ the Doctor muttered.

Well, he thought, if the High Council expected him to put up with being pushed around like a puppet they had another think coming. He swept back his coat tails and sat at the desk, then pulled the notepad around until it was in front of him and straightened it to the millimetre, before he plunged his hands into his pockets in search of a pen.

Frowning, he pulled out a folded scrap of neon orange paper that had definitely not been in there earlier that day. As he opened it out and studied the hastily scribbled note, his scowl, and his feelings of unease, deepened.

‘What?’

The door chime sounded and he stuffed the note hastily back in his pocket before calling out ‘come in’.

He expected to see the Keeper of the Matrix but instead, the figure who entered the room was stooped, elderly, and entirely unfamiliar. He wore black and white lawyer’s robes that seemed far too large for him, and his hair and beard were as white and wispy as spiderwebs.

‘Doctor,’ he began in a voice like tearing paper, ‘it is a pleasure to meet you. I wish the circumstances were more pleasant.’

The Doctor leaned back in his chair and knitted his fingers over his lap. ‘You appear to have me at a disadvantage, sir. Have we met?’

‘Oh, no, no, I move in far humbler circles,’ said the old man. ‘My name is Metraseth. I am the court defender appointed by the High Council to aid you in this…’

‘Ah,’ the Doctor interrupted. ‘Then I’m afraid you’ve had a wasted journey, Mr… Metraseth, was it? I’m sure you’re entirely competent but I really would rather handle my own affairs, if you don’t mind.’

‘Sorry to hear that, Doctor,’ said the old man. ‘I confess I did hope you might have changed your mind. However, even if you do insist on handling things yourself, I thought I would drop by and offer my assistance in preparing your defence. Everything would be your decision, I would merely be on hand to offer an opinion on points of law, perhaps, or methods of presentation. I do have some experience with this new way of accessing the Matrix…’

The Doctor tried to read the old man’s face for signs of deceit, but all he saw was a wrinkled visage and a pair of vacant, pale, blue eyes that blinked at him, awaiting a response. He sighed.

‘Eh, no, no, I don’t think so. But thank you anyway. I think I’ll wait for the Keeper and take my chances.’

Metraseth looked disappointed, but he nodded and turned to leave.

‘Very well, very well. It is, after all, your fate that is at stake, Doctor. You have every right to say how you wish things to proceed. But I shall remain on the station for the duration of the trial, so should you need anything, please don’t hesitate to call.’

He started shuffling towards the door, and an idea occurred to the Doctor.

‘Are you with the Halls of Law?’ he asked.

Metraseth paused and turned back. It seemed to take him an extraordinarily long time just to come around one hundred and eighty degrees.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You’re a court appointed defender,’ said the Doctor. ‘Do you work ordinarily within the Halls of Law on Gallifrey?’

The old man grinned and gave a stiff bow. ‘For my sins, Doctor, I do. In the Junior Judicial Chambers.’

‘The man prosecuting me,’ said the Doctor. ‘What do you know about him? What’s his name? What’s his background?’

‘Why would you wish to know that?’

‘Call it curiosity. And I should rather like to know more about his motives.’

‘His motives, I would expect, are to prosecute the case on behalf of the High Council. I should say…’

‘But that’s not all, is it?’ asked the Doctor. ‘Have you been watching the trial so far?’

‘With great interest.’

‘And what is your legal opinion? Has everything been as you’d expect it to be, as an experienced court defender?’

Metraseth shuffled a little on the spot. ‘Well, I… I couldn’t say. Every trial is different, Doctor, and this one is somewhat unusual…’

‘But the Valeyard’s behaviour,’ the Doctor went on. ‘You see nothing amiss there?’

‘He is perhaps a little… spirited at times, but then he is a good deal younger than I am. I imagine much of his performance is fuelled by the zeal of youth.’

‘Oh, come now. Even the most overzealous lawyer can still operate within the bounds of the law. The Valeyard’s evidence was shaky at best…’

‘I do not know the man personally,’ said Metraseth. ‘In truth, I know very little of his history, only that he is an experienced advocate and highly thought of in the Halls of Law.’

‘You’ve never faced him in court?’

‘Not yet,’ said the old man. ‘Perhaps one day.’

‘Well,’ the Doctor sighed, ‘thank you, I suppose. If I need help, I shall remember your offer.’

The old man bowed again and made for the door. As he left, the Doctor heard Metraseth mumbling, speaking to someone in the corridor outside, and after he’d shambled out of sight, another man took his place on the threshold. The Keeper of the Matrix regarded the Doctor with a mixture of disdain and apprehension and didn’t come any further into the room. Perhaps he thought he’d be attacked, coming into the presence of such a dangerous criminal, the Doctor thought dryly.

‘Doctor,’ the Keeper greeted him. ‘I’ve come to instruct you in the operation of the new Matrix interface, should you wish to use it in your evidence.’

The Doctor got to his feet. ‘I do. Lead on, Keeper.’

***

Petturi waited until the flurry of activity as the court went into recess died down and Zenobia’s corridors quietened, the various members of the jury and learned Time Lords heading to their assigned quarters for dinner and probably copious amounts of wine. Once a relative peace had returned, he walked from his office to the room they’d given the Doctor to work in, just to check the guards were all in place and behaving. He had just come around a curve in the hallway when he saw the old man, Metraseth, heading into the room and Petturi paused for a moment just to watch what happened. The old man only stayed with the Doctor for a minute or so then was off again, bumbling away along the corridor, passing the Keeper of the Matrix as the latter strutted past in the opposite direction. Strange though, Petturi thought. The court defender wasn’t headed back towards his own rooms. Rather he was off in the direction of the Valeyard’s office again. Petturi considered following, but then another idea occurred. If Metraseth was safely occupied in snooping, that meant the defender’s office would be empty.

Petturi found the room and entered his override code into the keypad. The door opened with a slight hiss as the locking mechanisms disengaged. Inside, the place was in darkness, only a dull blue glow coming from the displays on the top of the desk, which picked out a few details of a bookcase and stack of document boxes nearby. Petturi felt around the doorframe until he found the light controls.

A slight twinge of disappointment twisted inside him when he saw the place was neat and not at all extraordinary. Like every room on the station, the renovators had made a token effort to add some grandeur when the place was transformed from a laboratory to a floating courthouse, but they had only gone so far as to add a few bits of moulding here and there to the otherwise spartan furnishings. The only sign now that this place was connected with the law were the racks of statute books and case reports in every office. Petturi had inspected all the rooms on Zenobia prior to arrival of the dignitaries and he had yet to see one of those books look as if it had ever been opened.

He hadn’t really expected to find anything particularly personal in the office. None of the lawyers or jurors thought the trial would last very long and so there was no need to bring any home comforts. They’d also been subject to strict searches and security arrangements before leaving Gallifrey – Petturi had seen to that himself – so most had left all but the essentials simply to avoid the hassle of having things confiscated or scanned. There were, however, a few documents on the desk. A file marked ‘Omega Clearance Only’, bearing the sigil of the High Council, lay on top of a pile of handwritten paper notes and a small leather-bound book. Petturi pushed the file aside. His clearance was just short of being able to open that file and it would be DNA coded to make sure only the intended recipient could read it anyway. He did, however, note that the name on its cover was ‘Kalpea’. Most of the notes beneath contained ideas, by the looks of it, of ways to show the Doctor was an asset to Gallifrey, lists of planets he’d saved or times he’d got the High Council out of danger. The book, a journal with ivory-coloured pages, held more of the same. He allowed himself a half smile when he spotted Castellan Maxil’s name on a list of possible witnesses for the defence. The Castellan would’ve loved that.

Closing the notebook, however, Petturi saw that its cover was embossed in gold, the circular script spelling out the name of its owner. Lord Kalpea. The sealed orders from the High Council may well have been amongst the crates of documents sent to Zenobia ahead of the lawyers themselves, but this looked more like a personal journal, something a Time Lord would carry on his person. But then that would imply that Kalpea had come to Zenobia, as Petturi thought he had done. If Kalpea had come to Zenobia and then fallen ill, then where was he? And where had this Metraseth come from?

Petturi replaced everything on the desk so that there was no evidence anything had been touched and was about to leave when something on the far side of the office caught his eye. He’d been wrong about the lack of personal touches. Kalpea, or whoever was using this room, had brought something with them and, worse still, it was not something Petturi had seen mentioned in any of the inventories or security sweeps done on personal property coming to the station. Standing in the corner, beside a mirror and an empty robe stand, was a tall, wooden-cased clock. Petturi realised he’d been faintly aware of its ticking all the time he’d been in the office but only then registered it properly.

He crossed the room to get a closer look at the thing. It was dusty, as if it had been sitting in that office for centuries, but Petturi knew he hadn’t seen it when he conducted his first inspection. As he drew nearer, he could also sense a slight vibration in the air around the clock and laying his hand against it, he felt not smooth, varnished wood but something that hummed with power. That explained how it got there, at least. He couldn’t avoid calling the Castellan now. Someone had brought an unauthorised time capsule on board the station and was trying to hide it as part of the décor.

As he raised his wrist unit, ready to place the call, however, he spotted something on the floor, in the narrow space between the edge of the clock and the office’s back wall. It was too dark to make out what it was, but Petturi went down on one knee and peered into the shadows.

At first, he couldn’t understand why anyone would want a doll dressed in the robes of a court defender. Then he tried to pick it up and felt the soft, yielding if ice-cold flesh. He let the miniature body drop with a cry of revulsion and backed away.

He turned, and found Metraseth the defender before him. Petturi had no idea when the old man had come in. He was standing straighter now, the hunch in his shoulders gone, and was it Petturi’s imagination or did the wrinkled old face seem somehow unrealistic now? The defender was also holding some kind of weapon, aimed directly at Petturi’s chest.

‘Well now, Captain, I must commend you on your thoroughness. But then security in an endeavour such as this is of paramount importance to the High Council, is it not? It would be simply catastrophic, should the general populace on Gallifrey learn what was really happening here, after all?’

‘Who are you?’ Petturi demanded. ‘You’re not the court defender.’

The old man took a step nearer.

‘Quite correct,’ he said. His voice had lost the creak of age. He looked right into Petturi’s eyes and any cloudiness that had been there in his gaze earlier was now completely gone. Petturi found himself unable to look away.

‘I am the Master,’ the man said, ‘and you will obey me.’

***

The Doctor tapped in a numerical code on a keypad and waited for the relevant door to slide open.

‘Can’t believe they haven’t deleted my PIN code,’ he muttered. ‘They probably haven’t even cleaned my desk out yet.’

‘Is it weird being home?’ Bill asked as they headed into the control room.

‘This isn’t home. This is just a space station.’

‘I know, but…’

‘I can’t afford to get nostalgic right now,’ he said, heading over to the console, where Missy was still working. She had now taken the copy of the Keeper’s key that Bill had printed off in the TARDIS and had it connected to the controls by a series of crocodile clamps and brightly coloured wires. There were no pictures on the monitors now.

‘There’s too much to do,’ the Doctor muttered. ‘Have you got that interface patched in yet?’

Missy held up two wires with what looked like the sensor pads they put on patients in hospitals for an ECG. ‘All it needs is a brain.’

‘Good.’

‘It’s going all right though,’ Bill said. ‘Nobody’s cottoned on.’

‘That we’re aware of,’ the Doctor muttered.

He crossed to a couch over by the wall of the control room and lay down, pulling off the black leather cap he’d been wearing as part of his disguise. He ran a hand through his hair and fluffed it up a bit, then lay back with his hands clasped over his stomach.

‘The tricky part’s still to come,’ he said, as Missy went to his side and attached the sensor-wires to his temples. ‘I need to know I can rely on you.’

At first Bill thought he was talking to her and was a little hurt, but then she realised he had taken hold of Missy’s wrist as she made to step away, and he was now staring right up at her.

‘I said I’ll do it. You’ve given me my script. This universe blows up, I’m in tiny pieces as well.’

‘I mean it, Missy. If anything goes wrong…’

‘I know, all of time and space will be destroyed. You have mentioned.’

She flounced back to the controls and started flipping switches and tapping in commands with what looked like deliberate heavy-handedness.

Bill crouched on her haunches beside the Doctor’s couch.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on her,’ she said in a low voice.

‘You’ll have enough to do already,’ replied the Doctor. ‘Bill, if there was any other way, you know I’d never ask you to risk this…’

‘If you didn’t ask me, I’d never speak to you again. That’s what friends do. They do the stuff they know their friends could never ask them to. And they do it so their friends don’t have to ask.’

He smiled, but it was faint and didn’t last long.

A change in the ambient light about the room made Bill glance over her shoulder and she saw that one of the monitors in the bank on the wall behind Missy had flared into life. It showed an image of a spacecraft, silver and slick like those posters from the 1930s for trains and ocean liners. Along its prow was the name ‘Hyperion III’.

‘The Doctor and his amazing technicolour nightmare coat is online,’ said Missy.

‘Set up a gateway to allow me access to the general location in the Matrix files, and I’ll do the rest when I get in there,’ said the Doctor.

‘So,’ Bill began, ‘the Matrix. Is it like, well, _The Matrix_? As in Keanu Reeves and Trinity and ‘there is no spoon’, all that? Can you actually go inside it?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said the Doctor. ‘Direct access is limited. Only authorised personnel can view the information stored in its files. That’s why we needed the Keeper’s key, just to unlock the system. Once you could only break in through a neural interface like this one.’ He tapped the sensor on his temple. ‘But this station actually has a new system, physical as well as mental immersion. Basically they’ve created a room with adaptable dimensions tied into the Matrix files. The environment being shown in the Matrix – the deck of that spaceship, for example, is projected onto hard light holograms so you can actually interact with the events.’

‘So, basically the same as a holodeck on _Star Trek?_ ’ Bill asked.

‘Is _Star Trek_ that docu-soap you’re always watching about the big spaceship?’

‘Close enough. But you’re not going in there.’

‘No, I’m doing it the old-fashioned way. I am in there, as in he’s…’

Bill nodded. ‘I’m starting to get used to it now, it’s OK.’

‘He’s going in to watch some memories of his to try and find something to rebut everything I’ve just presented to the court.’

Bill glanced over at the monitor. The other Doctor was with a slim young woman with a blaze of red curls, on what she assumed, since the Doctor had mentioned it, was the deck of a spacecraft, though it looked a bit like a hotel foyer.

‘So he’s going for a wander through his own memories. That must be weird.’

‘Actually no,’ said the Doctor, frowning. He propped himself up on one elbow and watched the screen for a moment. ‘Hadn’t really thought about it ‘til now. That evidence he’s cutting excerpts from has to have been uploaded from a future version of him, of us. Well, future version of him, past version of me. The Matrix gathers information from…’

‘From every Time Lord wherever they are in time and space and then just censors the information it allows them to see depending on where they are in Gallifrey’s timeline,’ Bill interrupted, smiling when she saw the Doctor’s bemused expression. ‘The Valeyard told me.’

‘You need to stay away from him.’

‘It was fine. He was… all right, actually. He’s… He said the only memories he has are the ones the Matrix quarantined away, so he only knows the bad things that happened to you, or that will happen to you or whatever. Verb tenses in your language must be insane.’

‘Wait ‘til you get to the personal pronouns.’

‘But thing is, you have all of that stuff, all the guilt and the hurt and the anger and everything but you don’t let it control you because you’ve got all the other memories as well. The good stuff, the positive things. You called him Mr Hyde, but remember what happened in that story. Neither of them could exist with just good or just evil, they had to have a mixture to survive. You can cope with losing people the same way everybody else in the universe does, because you remember the good stuff. He hasn’t got that.’

‘You should still stay away from him, Bill,’ said the Doctor, but his expression had softened a little, and as he looked up at her, she thought he actually seemed proud.

‘Anyway,’ the Doctor went on. ‘Getting back to the point…’

‘Before we all die of old age, which for a Time Lord is saying something,’ muttered Missy.

‘He shouldn’t be able to see events from his future because the APC net should block his access. So I don’t really know how he’s able to watch that. But the thing is, I can’t risk physically going in there after him, but I can use the old-fashioned method and use a direct neural link. He can only watch those memories and tell the computers to bookmark and copy a few segments here and there to compose his evidence. He can’t change anything. Read-only access. Only the Lord President has read and write privileges. Or rather, the Lord President and any former Lord Presidents.’

‘Still can’t believe they elected you,’ Bill said quietly. ‘Won’t he notice if you change stuff though?’

‘Not right now. I’m just going to go along behind him and tweak a few things. But he’ll notice in the trial room when we watch it back and that’s what I’m counting on. Now, I’ll be unconscious for a while. You know what you need to do, you and Nardole?’

‘Yeah, we’re fine. He’s getting the stuff ready back at the TARDIS. You’re sure the real what’s her name and Glitz aren’t going to turn up here?’

‘No, no they can’t. I had thought that the Master sent them here, just to stir things up, but obviously we now know that the Master isn’t here. What I saw in the trial room back then was Missy doing a fairly good impersonation of her former self. Or it will be. So, no Master, no one to bring Mel and Glitz as witnesses. But we still need a couple of substitutes to make sure everything goes according to plan. Or according to memory.’

‘I don’t get this though,’ Bill said, ‘if you’re only having us do these things because that’s what you remember happening, isn’t that like…’

‘Bootstrap paradox, yes. Lot of it about these days.’

‘Well, whatever it is, we’re sorted, yeah. I think we know what we’re supposed to do and when.’

‘Good.’ The Doctor sank back onto the couch. ‘I’m ready, Missy.’

‘Excellent. This is my favourite bit,’ Missy said. She flipped a switch and the Doctor grimaced in pain. Bill took his hand as an instinct and he crushed her fingers in his grip.

‘What you doing? What’s wrong?’ Bill demanded, glaring at Missy, but then the Doctor relaxed and lay back, dropping into what looked like a deep sleep.

‘Just the initial shock of linking up with the computer,’ Missy said. ‘Anyone would think you didn’t trust me.’

‘Wonder why that is?’

Bill got up and wandered over to the control panel. Nardole was waiting for her back at the TARDIS but she couldn’t bring herself to leave just yet, not until she was sure the Doctor was all right.

‘So how long will he be out for?’ she asked.

‘How should I know? Long as he’s having fun chasing around in there, I suppose. Could be hours. Could be days.’

On the screen, the other Doctor and his companion stepped out of their TARDIS into a gloomy looking chamber full of racks of boxes and tarpaulin-covered shapes.

‘No one sends a mayday call unless it’s a matter of life and death,’ said the girl. Bill thought about the other girl they’d shown at the trial, the one called Peri. What a horrible way to die. And if the Valeyard was to be believed, she was just one in a long list. Bill watched the new companion on screen and wondered what happened to her.

‘Yes,’ said the Doctor on the monitor, ‘let’s exercise the grey cells for once, shall we, rather than the muscles? That was no ordinary mayday call. It was beamed specifically at the TARDIS.’

‘So it’s from someone who knows you.’

‘In which case, why wasn’t it signed?’

‘Panic,’ said the girl, ‘desperation? Well, we won’t find out by hanging about in here, will we?’

‘We won’t go blundering into a trap, either,’ replied the Doctor, giving her a dour look.

‘I’ve never seen this side of you before. You’re usually the one who goes charging in, regardless.’

The Doctor’s frown grew more intense as he looked around the room. ‘Can’t you sense it, Mel?’

‘Sense what?’

‘Evil. There’s evil in this place.’

‘That’s her then,’ Bill said, nodding towards the screen. ‘Mel.’

‘Don’t think I met that one,’ Missy muttered. ‘I think after Peri, the next one he turned up with when I was there was some teenager with a stupid name and a baseball bat. Can’t remember much about that though. Something to do with cats.’

‘I still can’t get my head round that being him,’ Bill said. She looked over at her own Doctor, lying still and silent on his couch, his breathing steady.

‘They’re all the same to me,’ Missy said. ‘With our people, we’re so used to changing faces, you learn to look beneath the surface and see the same bundle of personality defects that gets passed along each time. Same neuroses, different face, that’s all.’

‘Yeah, but… what is with that coat? I mean…’ She gestured towards the Doctor on the couch. ‘He dresses pretty cool for an alien. He’s like a sort of retired rock star with occasional bouts of 1960s mod. But what… how do you go to get dressed, when there’s a wardrobe on the TARDIS as big as a city, and see that coat and think yeah, that’s the best thing I could possibly find in here.’

Missy sighed and sat back. ‘Time Lords generally only have thirteen lives, has he ever told you that?’

‘Yeah, he did. But he said he’d started again from scratch…’

‘Yeah, all right for some,’ Missy grumbled, ‘but my point is, let’s see how good your maths is -that one…’ She nodded to the screen, ‘..is number six out of thirteen.’

It took Bill a moment to click.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Midlife crisis!’

***

The Doctor waited in the corner of the ship’s gymnasium on board the Hyperion III, or at least on a hard-light hologram of that room inside the Matrix chamber, and watched as his former self pedalled desultorily on a static exercise bike. A slight shudder of panic rippled through him as he saw a second version of his sixth incarnation appear on the opposite side of the gym, but the other Doctor was focused on himself, prowling around a few feet away from the bike, glowering in concentration. Rationally, the Doctor knew that neither the hologram nor the flesh and blood version of him would be able to see him there, but he still felt painfully exposed.

His old friend Mel stood beside the bike. He’d forgotten how much hair she had. River Song could still have given her a run for her money, but it would’ve been a close contest. He found it difficult to remember a lot of the details about Mel. Was it Brighton he’d met her in for the first time? Or her hometown of Pease Pottage in Sussex? He seemed to recall there’s been a lot of complications in the timeline around her, all thanks to his former self choosing this future adventure to pull up as evidence.

He remembered the day she’d left quite clearly though. She’d gone off with Glitz, God alone knew why, to look for adventure. The Doctor thought back to the older Glitz he’d met on the Nosferatu just recently and wondered if he would even have remembered Mel. The Doctor himself hadn’t thought about her in years. In his head, he repeated what he’d said to Bill. He did not have time for nostalgia, even if it did bring a warm feeling to see old friends again.

‘Well, that’s it then,’ said the Doctor on the bike. ‘End of the line.’

‘What do you mean?’ Mel asked.

‘Well, our contact. Obviously he’s the one who’s been pulverised.’

‘So we give up?’

‘What else?’

How was his former self seeing this? The Doctor wondered. Why would the Keeper of the Matrix have allowed him to access future information? It made no sense. Just the problems with Mel, of having to pretend he didn’t know her when they first met, or rather when she first met him in her own timestream, showed up how problematic having access to your own future could be.

‘The hydroponics centre,’ Mel said. ‘I told you about the sudden panic when I was there.’

The hologram Doctor sat up straighter on the exercise bike. ‘Hm. Yes, there does seem to be a lot of activity focused down there. Might be worth a closer look, I suppose.’

‘Then let’s go.’

The real Sixth Doctor gave a nod of satisfaction and wandered off, heading off to position himself for another important scene in the narrative, the Doctor thought. The air around him shimmered then a wall formed behind him, blocking him from view. Another room must have formed around him but Mel and the Doctor on the bike remained in the gymnasium, frozen. The Matrix was aware there was another user present and wasn’t entirely sure what to do. Usually non-observed scenes would dissipate and resolve into the next pertinent piece of information but the software was growing confused with there being two of them there.

The Doctor concentrated and for a few seconds, the two hologram figures went into reverse.

‘So we give up?’ Mel asked again.

‘What else?’ asked the Sixth Doctor with a sigh.

‘The hydroponics centre. I told you about the sudden panic when I was there.’

The figures froze again.The Doctor concentrated, picturing the scene and the new words in his mind whilst at the same time thinking hard about the instructions he wanted the Matrix to follow.

When he opened his eyes, the two figures jumped back into life again.

‘My dear Melanie,’ said the Sixth Doctor, ‘if you wish to pursue this completely arbitrary course, pray hurry along to the hydroponic centre and leave me to my static and solitary peregrinations.’

Not exactly Shakespeare, but he thought he’d captured the Valeyard’s oddly convoluted and verbose way of speaking. Where he got that from, the Doctor could only guess. Still, he thought, it was an improvement on ‘timey-wimey’.

Satisfied with his progress so far, he started across the gymnasium, ready to catch up with his other self and see what else could be altered. He’d made it halfway when the room shimmered and changed into a dark corridor. There was no sign of the other Doctor. That was odd, the Doctor thought. Since the Matrix’s chamber worked with dynamically adaptable dimensional engineering, it could expand and contract to suit the simulation playing out in it, and to accommodate any number of observers physically present in the room. In theory it could run several different simulations concurrently and a number of people could interact with them, oblivious to each other’s presence. In fact, the Doctor was kind of relying on that for later. But the other Doctor had only been gone for a minute or so, and the Doctor was concentrating on following him, not on his own little fantasy. The programme should have kept them together.

Confused and lost, the Doctor followed the corridor, hoping to turn a corner and find his other self up ahead. This was obviously still part of the Hyperion III from the architecture, but it wasn’t a section he particularly remembered. It was a long time ago, he supposed, and there had been people dying all around him, which might have drawn his attention more than spaceship décor, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong.

He carried on along the corridor, picking a direction at random. All the way along, he didn’t see any other holograms either. Surely there should have been passengers or staff moving around the ship? Or maybe because he didn’t quite remember any of this, the Matrix was making something up based on vague recollections.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked, addressing the system in general. ‘Where has he gone?’

A loud hiss sounded behind him. The Doctor spun around. The end of the corridor, where the door from the gymnasium should have been, was now thick with shadow, so dark it was impossible to see more than a couple of metres along its length. He had only just gone through that section and it had been lit normally.

‘Hello?’ he called.

He couldn’t see anything, but he knew there was something, _someone_ there in the dark. The air shifted slightly and there were tiny but audible noises, faint rasps and hisses, like paper or fabric brushing against a solid surface.

‘Who’s there?’ the Doctor asked. As he spoke, he thought how ridiculous this was. If there was something there, it could only be a product of his own mental link with the Matrix, something from his memory leaking out into the playback. Try as he might, however, he couldn’t call it forward into the light or even get a sense of what it was.

‘Who are you?’ the Doctor tried again.

Something moved in the darkness. With painful slowness, a shadow detached itself from the rest and crept forward. The Doctor peered, struggling to make out any details, but he could trace the lines of a Time Lord collar. As the figure came closer, the silhouette grew more distinct, but the body itself remained in darkness, despite the corridor lights, as if it was actually composed of shadow. It looked very much like a Cloister Wraith but that was impossible. Those were confined to Gallifrey, or they should’ve been. Had one of them managed to infiltrate the new interface?

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ the Doctor told it. ‘You need to return to your parent server.’ He reinforced his words with a mental command to the Matrix systems.

‘Joral,’ hissed the wraith.

‘What?’

The wraith stood completely immobile and silent.

‘What’s a Joral? What are you talking about?’

‘Burning,’ the wraith said.

The Doctor shivered and sent the mental command to the Matrix again. ‘You need to go back to the mainframe on Gallifrey, you shouldn’t be here.’

The wraith remained static for a second longer then drifted backwards, disappearing back into the pool of shadows it had emerged from. The air shimmered and the corridor disappeared. He was now standing in the cargo hold of the Hyperion III, near the hydroponics bay behind its frosted plastic walls. His other self was there, watching as his hologram and Mel crossed the hold.

_Joral_ , the Doctor thought. The word was familiar but he couldn’t place it. And he would have to pay attention to the shadows from now on. If one cloister wraith had managed to slip through, there could feasibly be others lurking in the dark.


	8. Ghosts from the Future

The Keeper paced the length of his office, while around him, the monitors showed reams of statistics and diagnostic displays in slowly spinning script. Through a glass partition, he could just make out the stained glass door to the Matrix chamber, the fourth of a series of access points spread out around the main ring of the station. A few hours before he’d watched the Doctor step through it and now he waited impatiently to see the man re-emerge. What on Gallifrey would he do if the man decided to try and hide in there? Should he have gone with the Doctor into his memories? But then he’d have ended up standing around, probably plagued by inane questions and yet more accusations from the Doctor about fraud and interference, none of which he would be able to answer. This entire affair was doing nothing for his nerves.

The comms app on his desk gave a bleep to tell him the connection was established and saved the Keeper from making any decision. The Lord President’s voice barked from a speaker on the desk, and the tinny quality of the sound doing nothing to conceal his bad temper.

‘Well?’

‘It would appear to be back on track, so to speak,’ the Keeper said.

‘Good. Let us hope the earlier incident was simply a lapse in judgement on our friend’s part.’

‘Hm,’ the Keeper muttered. He glanced at the monitors. A little more activity in the Matrix’s local servers than there should be, but nothing too worrying. Probably just the Doctor messing around as he tried to find his evidence. Probably had a dozen different simulations running at once because he couldn’t fathom how to close them down. He really should have gone in there too.

‘Should I return to Gallifrey?’ the Keeper asked hopefully.

He heard a rustle of fabric from the speaker.

‘Er…no,’ said the Lord President at length. ‘I think it best you stay there, just in case.’

‘Surely you have others here who can keep an eye on the Valeyard? Captain Petturi could…’

‘Yes, but I need someone there with the technical knowhow to ensure nothing more goes wrong. That business with the first evidence is proof of that. Your redaction and quick thinking, Keeper, probably saved our skins. No, no, I need you there.’

The Keeper felt as if his entire body had deflated.

‘Very well,’ he said, resignedly. He cut the channel and cursed under his breath. In all his regenerations, he had been off world exactly three times, two of those when he was still in the Academy, and all of those times had been unbearable. He couldn’t understand how people like the Doctor wanted to gad about the universe. The universe was vast and cold and full of nightmares. Space itself was just a gulping great monster with a dozen different ways to kill you. Sometimes he even wished he’d studied temporal philosophy or regenerational pronoun declensions in Old High Gallifreyan rather than the technical arts, as sitting on the station, he understood almost every mechanism ticking away around him, how delicate those mechanisms were and how easily they could fail and let space kill him in whichever brutal way it chose.

He checked the monitors again, if only to distract himself, and noticed the activity levels on the local servers was still peaking. In fact, it seemed to be growing more frantic. Frowning, he slumped into his chair by the controls and tapped in a few commands, throwing up the relevant stats on the largest of the screens before him.

Oddly, the routines showing the greatest amount of drain on the system were all in the APC net, not the sections dealing with the walk-in simulation. Something was taxing the systems meant to monitor and regulate the Matrix, but no matter how many logs and activity viewer windows he pulled up, the Keeper couldn’t find any reason for it. According to all his controls, the Matrix was working just as it should. It was something to do with the link back to Gallifrey, though. He could make that much out. Although everything was buffering to local drives on the station to save memory and power, the system still had to connect back to the Matrix proper and it was that link that seemed to be having problems, but the readings made no sense. Whatever was happening, it was making the APC net work far harder than it usually would to keep in control of everything. The Keeper set an alert on the system to bleep his comms unit if the drain grew any worse.

If it got really bad, he thought with a smile, he might even have to go back to Gallifrey to check the system there. He could at least hope.

***

The Doctor finished positioning his Sixth incarnation amongst the wreckage of the Hyperion III’s communications equipment, giving him a fire axe just to make the scene complete and as incriminating as possible. In one corner of his mind, he kept track of the real version of his other self, but he was happily occupied in another section of the Matrix, watching himself run around while humanoid plant creatures picked off the crew and passengers one by one. Once he was satisfied with his sabotaged footage, the Doctor quickly ran over the rest of the events of those days, confirmed to himself that there was nothing else that needed altering, and took a deep breath, mentally preparing himself to go back to reality.

He turned away from the communications room and started to empty his mind, but froze. Ahead there was only darkness. The rest of the ship had dissolved into thick shadow. That was normal enough. He was getting ready to leave the simulation. Only this darkness was moving. Slowly, a set of figures coalesced. Again he made out the stiff collars and long Time Lord robes but there were more of them this time, perhaps six or seven. Although they only crept forward step by unsteady step, they were coming closer.

‘Who are you?’ the Doctor called out. ‘What do you want?’

They were whispering, but all at once and faintly, so that he couldn’t make out whether any of them replied or if they were just chattering away to themselves.

‘The only way you could be here is through my memory,’ the Doctor said, ‘which means you’re under my control just like everything else here. Which means…’

He closed his eyes tightly shut and counted to ten.

He looked again, and his hearts stuttered slightly. The shadow figures were still there. They fell silent for a moment, as if trying to fathom what he was doing, then began their cacophony of whispers again. This time, he made out a word here and there. ‘Joral’ which he’d heard before, along with ‘Iravan’, ‘Lokasrai’ and ‘Ledia’.

They started moving again. The Doctor tried once more to make them disappear but either his control of the Matrix wasn’t absolute or something far stranger was going on. Either way, he didn’t fancy staying around to wait for the shadows to catch him. He focused, closed his eyes, and forced himself to exit the programme.

He sat up so abruptly he almost fell of the couch. The sensors tugged at his temples, threatening to pull off a layer of skin, and he remembered who and where he was and what he’d been doing. He looked around the control room, but everything seemed perfectly normal. Missy was sitting by the console, watching him with a curious expression, chin propped on her hand.

‘Welcome back,’ she said. ‘Did you have a nice sleep?’

‘What went wrong?’

‘At this end? Nothing. Which is as much of a surprise to me. I haven’t fiddled around with the Matrix’s interfaces for centuries. I half expected to turn your brain to jelly as soon as I threw the switch.’

‘Nothing showed up on the monitors? Nothing odd?’

‘Nothing. Bit of a spike in memory usage in the APC net a couple of minutes ago, but nothing too unusual. Why? Your little plan not go the way you wanted?’

The Doctor sighed, ran his hand through his hair and gave one final look around the console room. It hummed with power but was otherwise silent. Perhaps it had been some strange side effect of connecting to the Matrix again after all these years.

‘No,’ he said finally, ‘it was fine.’

He pulled the sensors off his temples and got up, finding his body stiff and aching as if his muscles had been tensed the whole time he’d been under. It was just the Matrix being its usual mess of dreams and nightmares, he concluded. It had drawn something from the depths of his subconscious. Maybe being back on Zenobia was making him think of Gallifrey, and the last time he’d been there, down in the cloisters. That visit was still hazy, his memory full of holes, but perhaps there was enough of it buried in his subconscious to make the Matrix produce those cloister wraiths. Still, he couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that he was missing something patently obvious.

He left the control room and headed for the Valeyard’s office. That was another problem he’d been putting off. What exactly was he going to do with the Valeyard when all this was over? Imprisonment was the only humane option he could think of but that then raised the question of how and where to keep him. He doubted even Stormcage could hold the Valeyard.

His earlier conversation with Bill also nagged at him when he tried to think about the issue. Bill was one of those people who looked for good in people. Most of his companions had been, and he wondered if that was maybe what he was drawn to, but was she right? It had never occurred to the Doctor that there might be any glimmer of hope in the Valeyard’s darkness. But then he’d never given up hope that one day the Master, or now Missy, would see the beauty of the universe and he was beginning to suspect that Missy was making progress in that direction. Could he justify locking a creature away for all eternity for fear of its power, when there might be some chance, however small, of its redemption?

‘Valeyard.’

It took the Doctor a second to realise the figure ahead was addressing him but when he did, he stopped. Standing at the far end of the corridor was a tall young man in the uniform of the Chancellery Guard. The captain, no less, from his insignia.

‘Can I help you?’ the Doctor asked.

The captain’s expression was oddly blank, but then he was a soldier, thought the Doctor.

‘The Inquisitor has requested your presence,’ said the guard.

‘Has she?’

‘If you would come with me.’

The guard captain turned and started along the hall. The Doctor had no choice. He couldn’t risk drawing undue attention to himself at this stage of the proceedings. He would just have to see what the Inquisitor wanted and hope she hadn’t seen through all the play acting.

They walked for a long while in silence. A very long while, in fact. The Doctor didn’t know the station’s layout particularly well but he found it odd how far away the Inquisitor’s office was from the rest of them. Just when he thought they’d finally reached the room, as the captain opened a door and stood to one side to let him through, the Doctor found himself in an elevator, and was soon descending down four levels, according to the display on the wall. When the doors opened again, the captain led the way into a much darker corridor, more like the cargo hold of a spacecraft than the bland, office-like décor above.

‘What exactly does the Inquisitor want to see me about?’ the Doctor asked.

The captain paused and turned to him, still blank-faced, and said simply, ‘It’s this way, sir.’

From the looks of the doors they passed and the old, faded posters on the walls, this part of the station was left over from its days as a stellar engineering research facility. There were a lot of battered warning signs declaring certain rooms contained ‘variable gravity’ or ‘dimensional instability’. A few of the doors had small windows, but every time the Doctor glanced through one, all he saw were empty, cleared out rooms, a few bare shelves and forgotten cables lying like dead vines on the floor. The courts must not have needed this section and not bothered to renovate it. Perhaps the Inquisitor wanted to speak to him away from the rest of the jurors and lawyers, the Doctor mused. If this section had been used for high-level experiments, many of the rooms might well be shielded from listening devices, or even the Matrix’s monitoring sensors.

Still, they kept on walking for what felt like hours and the Doctor realised he was now totally lost.

‘Where are we going, Captain?’ he asked, but got no reply. Finally, though, the guard crossed a wider space, a small foyer of some kind at one point but now just a void full of bits of old shelving and a few boxes of wires and abandoned tools. He came to a halt and stood beside a doorway there, one of those with a small window. The door was slightly ajar already and a light was on in the room beyond it. The Doctor went inside.

It was an old laboratory, with a few workbenches still in situ, though there were only clusters of disconnected wires hanging over them, or holes in the ceiling where they had been joined to other equipment overhead at one point. A chair lay overturned in one corner beside a metal shelving unit full of bell-jar-like objects that the Doctor recognised as the sort used in stellar manipulation experiments to hold miniature, artificial suns or black holes. He’d had one in his bedroom when he was young with a binary star inside. He’d always been fascinated by the engineering involved in such an innocuous-looking object. They were just jars, but each one held a micro-universe, controlling its own gravity and containing energies that could destroy half a galaxy. These were all empty, however, some cracked and others on their sides. There was also no sign of the Inquisitor.

The Doctor turned to address his escort and was just in time to see the captain close the laboratory door between them. The guard gave a final look through the window then disappeared into the darkness of the foyer beyond.

‘Hey!’ the Doctor shouted. He tried the door but predictably it was locked. He sighed. ‘You’d think I’d know a trap when I walk into one, at my age!’

‘Very true, Valeyard,’ said a voice behind him. A very familiar voice.

The Doctor’s hearts sank. The feeling of his insides turning to ice that had gripped him when he first realised they had arrived on the station too early, the feeling of the universe slipping through his hands and descending into chaos, returned with renewed vigour. He turned slowly.

‘I must say I’m impressed,’ said the Master. ‘I had thought the confession dial impregnable and yet here you are. I shall have to be more creative next time.’

Sometimes the Doctor could not believe his own stupidity. He had thought to himself earlier that the Master might already be here. During the trial… throughout his memory of the trial anyway, the Master had been manipulating events, even managing to squirrel himself away into the Matrix. But when he’d learned the Valeyard was out of time and events hadn’t taken place yet, he’d just assumed the Master wasn’t on the station either, that it had been Missy all along. He was so caught up in cursing himself and trying to think how this was going to tangle up the mess he’d already made of this trial, it took a moment for the Master’s words to register.

‘You designed the confession dial?’

‘To get you out of the way,’ said the Master. ‘Without their pet prosecutor, the High Council wouldn’t stand a chance of rigging this trial. You can imagine my… surprise, therefore, when you appeared. Tell me, how did you escape?’

The Doctor’s hand went automatically to the pocket of his robes, where the perception filter pressed against his side.

‘It’s a long story,’ he replied. ‘But you’re hardly the Doctor’s ally. Why would you want him to win?’

‘I didn’t say I wanted the Doctor to win,’ the Master said. ‘Although I do resent the High Council’s attempt to rob me of the satisfaction of killing him myself. But you and I both know, Valeyard, that this trial is about more than just the Doctor.’

‘You want to destabilise the High Council? Start a coup?’

The Master sneered. ‘Nothing so mundane. You needn’t play the innocent with me. I’ve watched the efforts of the High Council to contain the Matrix’s prophecy for some time now. I know what you are, and I know why you’re here, what they promised you.’

‘The Matrix’s prophecy?’ the Doctor asked, before he could stop himself.

‘Don’t insult my intelligence. The High Council might want to cover their ears but the truth is, you and I both know the Daleks are coming, the Time War is coming. This trial may well have been the Council’s way of suppressing what the Matrix has been trying to warn everyone about, but when I’m through, it will be the very means by which their treachery will be broadcast.’

The Doctor stared at him. Understanding washed over his brain like warm water. ‘The data stolen from the Matrix… the reason they moved Earth… they were afraid the Andromedans would learn about the Time War?’

‘Yes,’ said the Master, regarding him with suspicion, ‘but you know that. And not only the Andromedans. They thought if the other races found out that Gallifrey would soon be under threat, they’d band together to move against them. The High Council have known about this Time War for centuries. They know where it’ll begin and where it’ll end and yet they’re content to do nothing about it. They’re afraid of public panic, of losing political favour, as if that matters in the scheme of things. So you see, Valeyard, much though it pains me to lend assistance to the Doctor, I cannot allow this trial to continue as things stand.’

‘You’re doing all this for the good of Gallifrey?’ the Doctor asked with a slight sneer.

‘Certainly not,’ said the Master. ‘The High Council want the news of the Time War suppressed because they’re still confident they can find a way to prevent it. I intend to remove that option from the table.’

‘Why? A war like that would cause nothing but chaos…’

‘Will cause nothing but chaos, Valeyard. Gallifrey will fall. And when it does, I shall be there to…’

‘Declare yourself king of oblivion.’

‘Precisely.’

The Doctor nodded. ‘So I take it you’re planning to kill me.’

‘If you are what I think you are, you leave me little choice.’

‘And what exactly do you think I am?’

The Master straightened slightly, still giving him a critical look, but the Doctor noticed now how his old adversary was keeping his distance. Even when he paced a little around the laboratory, he made a wide arc and didn’t come within a few feet of the Doctor.

‘My sources on Gallifrey tell me there was a slight panic after the Keeper left for this station. Apparently a partition data store has gone missing from the Matrix. A data store containing all the negative experiences and emotions from the Doctor’s meddlesome existence. They also said the last people to have visited that section of the Matrix were the Keeper, the Castellan, and a Valeyard from the Junior Judicial Chambers named Dolyn. A Valeyard who apparently left Gallifrey without sending a single message to his two children, without replying to any of theirs to him, and without making his customary pilgrimage to his wife’s memorial at their residence in the Capitol before going offworld. I for one am able to surmise what happened. I can’t say as I understand exactly how it’s possible for a data store to develop sentience, nor do I completely grasp how you were able to commandeer Dolyn’s body, though I do sympathise with your predicament.’

He smiled and gave a brief glance down at his own body. Stolen, the Doctor remembered, from a Trakenite politician named Tremas, when the Master’s own regenerative cycle ran out.

‘The Doctor I can just about tolerate,’ he went on. ‘Whilst he’s fettered by morality I know I can always best him…’

‘And yet, hasn’t he beaten you pretty much every time?’

The Master twitched, but ignored the jibe. ‘But you… the idea of all the Doctor’s rage let loose upon the universe…’ He shook his head. ‘And if I understand the partition’s purpose correctly, it would mean that you have all the Doctor’s memories, until his very last regeneration…’

‘Well, until the twelfth at least,’ said the Doctor before he could stop himself.

The Master nodded again. ‘So you see, I have ample cause to kill you.’

The Doctor looked about the room. ‘What are you going to do? Beat me to death with a bell jar? You haven’t even brought your little shrink ray thingy.’

‘No need. These laboratories can all be isolated completely from the station’s gravitational and dimensional systems. When Captain Petturi activated the locking mechanism it triggered a pre-set subroutine in the gravity controls.’

The Doctor glanced over his shoulder on instinct and looked at the control panel by the locked door. Sure enough, a graph there was blinking orange and slowly turning to red, as the gravity readings rose. He realised he had felt the subtle change, a sort of pressure on his shoulders as if someone were trying to push him to his knees, and it was growing stronger. Behind him, he heard the Master chuckle to himself. The Doctor spun around to face him.

‘You’ll destroy yourself at the same time. Do you really expect me to believe you’d risk that?’

‘Hardly,’ said the Master. As the Doctor watched, the other Time Lord began to fade away. ‘Goodbye, Valeyard.’

By the time the Doctor reached the spot where the Master had stood, the other man was gone. A hologram, the Doctor thought, adding a few curses. He should’ve known. The Master would never have come to face the Valeyard – or what he believed was the Valeyard – unarmed and without a quick escape route.

He headed for the door but it was already hard just to cross the room. By the time he reached the control panel, he was struggling for breath and sweating from the exertion. The panel showing the gravity readouts was set just above head height and reaching up to it was like trying to push through solid rock. The Doctor’s knees gave out and he hit the floor hard. He used the moment it took to recover from the fall to do a quick mental calculation. At this rate he had a matter of minutes before the gravity in that room was strong enough to crush his skeleton. He managed to draw his sonic screwdriver from the pocket of his robes but getting back to his feet and getting up to the control panel would be impossible.

He closed his eyes, allowing himself a few seconds to calm down, to think. He pictured himself in the safest place he knew, the console room of his TARDIS, and told himself to think. He couldn’t reach the panel. It was too far for the sonic. He had perhaps two or three minutes before it became impossible to move at all, then a few seconds more before it was impossible to breathe and bones started to crack. But he couldn’t reach the door and he couldn’t reach the panel.

So, what can you reach?

He opened his eyes and blinked against the sting of sweat. He was looking at the shelving unit. Useless, he concluded. Everything that could have helped him had been taken out of the laboratory years ago. This was just an empty shell. All those shelves held were empty jars. Now if they’d still held a sun…

If they’d still held a sun, they would have to have been programmed to contain that sun and to create the optimum gravitational conditions inside to allow it to thrive.

The Doctor dragged himself nearer the unit and clawed at the jars on the lowermost shelf until one slid towards him. He managed to get it onto his lap and opened the control panel built into its base. A few tweaks with the sonic and he felt the glass vibrate. He let it fall to the floor just as it shattered. The pressure on him lifted and he gasped in a lungful of air before collapsing fully to the floor to gather his strength. Beside him, a few lights on the base of the jar blinked green, happily generating the environment in the room and countering the local systems. He couldn’t lie around though. The jar and the room would continue to fight against each other until one or other won out, and the jar was probably the weaker of the two systems so wouldn’t hold out for long, but it should give him enough time to get back to the door, now he could actually walk across the floor without it feeling like his body was made of lead, and to get the lock deactivated.

***

Bill sat on the steps in the console room and studied a slip of neon paper. She couldn’t make sense of most of it, as it was in that weird Time Lord writing that seemed to be all circles and lines, and hastily scrawled at that, but it still was enough to give her a sinking feeling every time she looked at it. She folded it and put it in her pocket buried her face in her hands and let out a long sigh. Something nudged her arm and she looked up to find Nardole at her side, mug of tea in hand. He gave a wan smile and she took the mug gladly.

‘Cheers.’

‘Shouldn’t be long now, I expect,’ Nardole said. ‘And by this time tomorrow it’ll all be finished, hopefully.’

‘This time tomorrow,’ Bill said, pulling out the paper again, ‘I’ll be in 1986.’

‘It’ll be fine. The Doctor’ll come and pick you up. And you’ve got the easy one. You get to go with him, technically speaking. I’ve got to get a lift back with Missy.’

‘Why can’t we just go with him?’ Bill sighed.

‘Timelines have to play out the way they’re supposed to,’ Nardole replied. ‘Mel left the station with the Doctor, so if you’re her…’

‘1986,’ she said again. ‘I won’t even have been born yet.’

‘He’ll be there.’

Bill hesitated, debating whether to say anything further. She knew how irritated Nardole and the Doctor for that matter had looked earlier when she’d mentioned speaking to the Valeyard.

‘He said not to wait for him,’ she told Nardole finally.

‘Who said not to wait for who?’

‘The Valeyard…’

Nardole sighed and shook his head.

‘I know,’ Bill said. ‘I know, everyone says not to talk to him. But what if that’s what he meant? What if I’m gonna get stuck in…’ She read the one line of English scribbled at the top of the scrap of paper, struggling to interpret the Doctor’s writing. ‘..Pease Pottage, wherever the hell that is, in 1986?’

‘You won’t.’

She really wanted to believe him. Just her guts wouldn’t let her.

‘Sometimes, it’s weird,’ she said. ‘You can be standing on some alien planet with five suns in the sky and butterflies the size of hang gliders and it feels so normal. And then other times, it’s like you can feel every mile in between where you are and where you’re from. And sometimes I think, what if something happened to me out here? I mean, God knows how far away we are from Earth and how, sort of, far away in time from my time. I don’t even know if I’m in my past or my future or what. What if something happened and I didn’t make it off of this station? Nobody would know. People back home, they’d all just think I’d disappeared. One of those faces you see on posters on lampposts. A picture on Facebook. Have you seen this girl? Nobody would ever find me.’

‘Bundle of laughs you are,’ Nardole muttered. He was trying to cheer her up, she knew, and so she forced a smile.

‘People like the Valeyard want you to think like that,’ he said. ‘They want to get into your head.’ He tapped his temple. ‘Sometimes it’s the only weapon they’ve got. The Doctor’s got your back, and so have I.’ He patted her shoulder and wandered off towards the controls.

‘Yeah,’ Bill said quietly. ‘Course.’

She really, really wished she believed it.

Outside, she heard the door to the Valeyard’s office swish open and a little warm wash of relief spread through her. She put down her tea and got to her feet, hurrying to the TARDIS door. Only she stopped on the threshold and peered out. A man had walked into the office but it wasn’t the Doctor. He was dressed in black velvet, a kind of weird tailcoat thing with an embroidered collar. Bill frowned and ducked back into the TARDIS. Draped across one of the rails was an identical coat, the thing the Doctor had been wearing when he’d emerged from Missy’s TARDIS the first time. He said he’d shoved it on when his own coat was ruined. Bill went back to the door and watched as the man came cautiously into the office, his back to the two TARDISes and his attention focused on the Valeyard’s desk on the upper level. He went straight to the desk and Bill heard papers shuffling. She glanced to her right and saw the Valeyard, still on his couch, watching the intruder with a faint look of amusement. She wasn’t sure if he’d noticed her, but he cleared his throat loudly and the man in black spun around.

‘Looking for something?’ the Valeyard asked.

‘Who are you?’ Bill added.

The man straightened and finally spotted Bill and the two TARDISes flanking the office door. He frowned.

‘Impossible,’ he muttered, taking a step towards Missy’s column-TARDIS. Then he seemed to remember himself, drew a small baton or maybe it was a gun or some sort from his pocket and aimed it first at Bill, as if to warn her against trying anything, then at the Valeyard.

‘How can you be here?’ he asked. ‘I just killed you.’

He looked again at the two TARDISes, switching aim from Bill to the Valeyard and back again as if unsure which was the greatest threat.

‘Get back in the TARDIS,’ the Valeyard hissed. It took Bill a moment to realise he was talking to her. She folded her arms and held her ground.

‘Oh, right, and why should I listen to you?’

‘Because that thing in his hand is a tissue compression eliminator. One shot from that and your body will be reduced to the size of a child’s toy. Feel free to disbelieve me and find out for yourself, of course.’

‘Why would you care if he shoots me?’ Bill asked.

‘What is going on?’ the stranger asked.

‘You always were incurably stupid,’ the Valeyard said, ignoring Bill and returning his attention to the intruder. ‘Although if you’ve killed the person I think you have, then I suppose I ought to be grateful. Saves me the trouble.’

‘Killed…’ Bill’s stomach lurched. He’d killed someone he thought was the Valeyard, and if the Doctor was still wearing his perception filter…

‘I suppose I should savour the opportunity,’ said the man. ‘After all, this way I can kill you twice.’

‘Who are you?’ Bill demanded. ‘What are you doing here?’

She stayed by the TARDIS door, ready to duck inside if needs be, but the other man was still weighing everything up, obviously bemused by the whole situation and trying to work out what was going on. She hoped that gave her a slight advantage. She hoped the horror growing inside her didn’t show on her face. What if he had killed the Doctor? Or worse, what if he was dying somewhere and they were wasting time with this standoff?

‘I might ask you the same question, young woman,’ the woman replied. ‘As it happens, I am known as the Master.’

‘The Master?’

The Valeyard laughed darkly. ‘Oh, I had forgotten that pomposity!’

‘Be silent,’ the Master warned, turning his compressor on the Valeyard for a moment before he returned his attention to Bill. His gaze flicked momentarily up at the TARDIS behind her. ‘You’re still modelling your TARDIS on the Doctor’s, I see, or is it the same one? And how did you bring mine here? I moved it to the Matrix chamber.’

‘You can’t be here,’ Bill said. ‘The Doc…’

‘The trial’s about to reconvene,’ the Valeyard interrupted. He gave Bill a scathing look. ‘Whatever you’re planning, you don’t have much time. Bill, go back into the TARDIS, now.’

‘Thanks, I’m fine where I am. There is no way I’m moving ‘till one of you tells me what’s going on. Who did he kill?’

The man in black raised an eyebrow. ‘I take it you’re one of the Doctor’s companions. A replacement for Ms Brown, perhaps. His taste in friends, I see, has not improved. If you’re trying to rescue him, I’m afraid you might find your efforts in vain. The High Council are set on his death…’

‘You haven’t the slightest comprehension of what’s happening here,’ said the Valeyard, before Bill had a chance to tell the Master what he could do with himself. ‘Ms Potts, for the last time, go back into the TARDIS.’

‘Or are you _his_ companion?’ the Master asked, gesturing with his weapon towards the Valeyard. ‘Seeking to emulate your creator to that extent, Valeyard? Quite pathetic.’

‘Are you planning to continue with this idle supposition or are you going to kill me? At least the latter would spare me the tedium of your incessant prattle.’

Bill stepped out of the TARDIS and came further into the office. ‘You said you killed someone already. Who?’

‘Such touching concern,’ asked the Master. He turned back to the Valeyard. ‘Evidently I was mistaken. I take it you employed a double to act as a diversion. Ingenious, but I’m afraid to say he’s been eliminated.’

‘Eliminated how?’ Bill asked.

‘Does it matter?’ The Master stepped closer to the Valeyard. ‘The exigent point here is the termination of these proceedings. I cannot allow this trial to continue.’

‘And you intend to stop it by killing me, I suppose,’ said the Valeyard, sounding almost bored. ‘Does seem rather unsporting, killing a man while he’s bound.’

‘You’ll forgive me if I prefer to leave it that way.’

‘You’re afraid of me? My great adversary?’

The Valeyard stood up slowly and the Master tightened his grip on his weapon.

‘I am not afraid,’ said the Master. ‘I simply recognise danger when it stands in front of me.’

‘What is going on out here?’ Nardole wandered out of the TARDIS, his eyes widening as he took in the scene.

The Master turned at the distraction and in a flurry of movement the Valeyard was right behind him. He landed a punch solidly on the Master’s jaw and stood back as the other man spiralled to the floor. As soon as the Master’s tissue compressor dropped, the Valeyard stooped to recover it. Then the Master was on his feet. He darted for the door and was out of the office before Bill or Nardole could react. The beam of energy the Valeyard shot after him bounced harmlessly off the door frame.

The Valeyard cursed under his breath and straightened his frock coat.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘that rather complicates matters, doesn’t it?’

‘Has he killed the Doctor?’ Bill asked. ‘Is that what he meant?’

‘Probably, and but for the caprice of circumstance he would have done the same to you. Next time I tell you to…’

‘You are not the Doctor. I don’t take orders from you. Or from him, for that matter. Anwayy, why does it matter to you?’

‘How long have you…’ Nardole interrupted, gesturing towards the Valeyard. He looked down at his unbound wrists and shrugged.

‘Since about a minute and a half after you tied me up. Knots are not your forte.’

‘So you just sat there all that time watching what was going on?’

The Valeyard shrugged. ‘It did occur to me that whoever was responsible for the leaked Matrix data and for imprisoning me might well have an interest in stopping this trial, and therefore might come here and attempt something. I had hoped they’d dispose of the Doctor in my place without realising the deception. It would appear the Master has done exactly that, or at least he believes he has.’

‘You used the Doctor as bait to draw him out?’ Nardole asked.

‘The Doctor’s plan was his own. I merely took advantage.’

‘But you have to know,’ Bill said. She approached him, but hesitated on the last few steps as he turned to face her, the Master’s tissue compressor still in his hands. ‘You must know if the Doctor’s dead. You’d remember.’

The Valeyard smiled. ‘Not if the timelines have been altered.’

‘Where is he? Please, tell me.’

For a minute she thought he was considering it, but then she saw the muscles in his jaw tighten and he raised the Master’s compressor.

‘I am sorry, Ms Potts, but this is where I take my leave. I wouldn’t recommend you try and stop me.’

‘You’re not going to shoot me,’ Bill said. She really wished she believed that.

He backed away a few steps. Bill’s pulse thudded in her ears.

‘Perhaps,’ the Valeyard said, barely audibly, then he threw the tissue compressor at her face. Bill grabbed for it as a reflex and by the time she’d recovered herself, the Valeyard was out of the office.

‘What just…’ Nardole began, but Bill didn’t let him finish.

‘We have to find the Doctor,’ she said. ‘Come on.’

She grabbed his arm and dragged him out into the corridor.


	9. Behind the Scenes

The Doctor fell into the elevator and collapsed against its mirrored walls to catch his breath as the lift ascended back up to the court levels of the station. His mind reeled, so many questions and worries in there that they all got stuck together and no coherent thought managed to come out. He moved on instinct, not really sure where he was going or what he intended to do, and tumbled out of the lift into one of Zenobia’s drab corridors. He wasn’t even sure where on the court level he was. He still ached from the assault in the lab, which had also reminded his shoulder that it hadn’t properly healed yet, and he could happily have slept for a week, but he kept going. The office, he realised. He had to get back there and round up the others. If the Master was here, their plans would have to change and there couldn’t be much time left before the court reconvened.

‘Valeyard.’

The Doctor held in the sigh he really wanted to give as he saw the Chancellery Guard – just a footsoldier this time, mind – standing in the hall ahead of him. The perception filter must still be working at least, he thought, glancing down at the state of his robes.

‘I’m in a bit of a hurry…’ he began, but the guard just strode closer.

‘I’m sorry, My Lord, but the Inquisitor has asked to see you. I’ve been looking for you.’

‘Haven’t we done this bit already?’

The guard frowned. ‘Sir?’

‘All right, all right, where is she?’

The guard turned slightly to the side and gestured down the corridor. ‘In her office, sir. This way.’

There was something about the man’s tone that hinted there was no room for argument, and though the Doctor didn’t think he was headed to a particularly pleasant meeting, he didn’t have the same odd vibe from this guard as he’d had from the captain. He followed. After only a couple of minutes, they reached a set of ornate double doors. The guard pressed a call button, waited, and then pushed the doors open when the Inquisitor called from within.

When the Doctor entered, she was standing on a dais that supported a large desk, while an attendant fiddled around with her headdress.

‘Ah, Valeyard,’ she said, then gestured to the attendant, who duly set down the headdress on the desk and hurried out of the office. ‘Close the door.’

Never a good sign, the Doctor thought, as he watched the attendant pull the doors shut. He hadn’t thought about this, about what might have gone on amongst the key players when he, as in his former self, wasn’t around. He bowed and tried not to wince when his sore muscles protested.

‘Madam. You asked to see me?’

‘I’m not sure ‘asked’ is quite the correct terminology,’ she replied, smiling without any warmth. She held up a crystal glass towards him. The Doctor shook his head then watched as she poured herself a drink from a wine bottle on the desk. Then she sat down slowly, placed the glass down with great delicacy and deliberateness, and regarded him with an unreadable expression.

‘I am not in the habit of being treated like a fool,’ she said. ‘I thought you might have known that. What is going on?’

The Doctor stared for a moment, deciding how to reply. On top of everything else he really did not need this. He realised he had no idea how much the Inquisitor knew about the trial or what was going on behind it. He’d had the impression throughout, both times, that she was oblivious to the High Council’s machinations but how certain could he be of that?

‘My Lady, I don’t…’ he began, but stopped short when he saw the anger flare in her eyes.

‘I am quite prepared to endure formality in court, Dolyn, but if you think obsequiousness will win me over in private you are very much mistaken.’

It hadn’t occurred to him that the Valeyard and Inquisitor knew each other before the trial. The Doctor hadn’t thought his stomach could sink any lower but it managed to. He tried furiously to remember what her name was.

‘Sorry,’ he said. That was innocuous enough. It seemed to appease her a little though. She nodded and took a sip of wine.

‘What is going on? The High Council won’t tell me anything.’

‘I’m not really in the loop either,’ the Doctor replied. ‘All I know is that they want the Doctor out of the way.’

‘Yes, I gathered that. I can’t say as I appreciate my courtroom being used as a weapon of assassination, and before this affair, Dolyn, I would not have thought it something you would countenance either.’

‘I have my orders.’

She considered him for a long time. The Doctor realised he was sweating again, though whether from his recent exertions or the sheer desire to get out of there, he wasn’t sure. The Inquisitor rose and walked slowly around the desk, glass in hand. She never once broke eye contact.

‘What do they have over you?’ she asked. She wandered over until they were face to face, a little too close for the Doctor’s liking. He could smell the wine and her perfume and wondered how the perception filter would hold up at this short distance, especially if they knew each other.

‘Is it the children?’ she went on. ‘Have they threatened Dema and Etevin? Is that why you haven’t contacted them?’

‘I can’t really talk about it,’ the Doctor replied. He hoped that sounded ambiguous enough to let her draw her own conclusions. He already hated this conversation. Lying to a bunch of stuck-up Time Lords in the theatre of the trial room was one thing but it was another to look this woman right in the eye, when he could hear the genuine concern in her voice, and manipulate her.

She reached past him and set her glass down on the shelf of one of the bookcases. The Doctor forced himself not to flinch away.

‘I still have my contacts back on Gallifrey,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I had them take the children out of the Academy and to a safe location until this is over. What worries me is the Doctor.’

The Doctor swallowed. ‘Oh?’

‘He’s not as stupid as they take him for. He knows something odd is going on and if I’ve read his file correctly, he may just get to the bottom of it. The concern is how the High Council will respond if he does, if we’ll be held responsible for their failure. So I have made arrangements.’ She stroked his arm, then spotted that the collar of his robe was unfastened and idly fixed it. ‘It has occurred to me that even if they are successful in executing the Doctor, they might not want the rest of us around to bear witness. It wouldn’t surprise me to find this station has a self-destruct mechanism in place.’

‘You could be right,’ the Doctor said. After all, he thought, this station does explode not all that long after this trial ends.

‘What they may not have anticipated,’ the Inquisitor went on, her hand still on his collar, pressed over his second heart, ‘is that there are those of us willing to die for the sake of our world.’

She sighed and let her hand slip down his side to his waist. Luckily the perception filter was in the pocket on the other side, but that didn’t make him feel any easier. Just how well did these two know each other?

‘This may sound odd, given that we may well die aboard this station,’ she went on, ‘but I’m glad you’re here, Dolyn.’

Before the Doctor could think of something to say or, better still, a way to subtly extricate himself, she snaked her arm around his waist beneath his outer robe and pulled him closer. She kissed him, but thankfully didn’t try to ruffle his hair or anything like that that would have given him away. Still, the embrace seemed to last an awfully long time and every second that ticked past, he waited for her to push him back, glare at him and demand to know who he really was.

At last though she stepped back slowly, picked up her glass from the bookshelf and drained the last of the wine.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘hopefully I’m wrong and we’ll back on solid ground again soon. I haven’t forgotten the Old Harbour. Reservations at the Retreat of Perpetual Solace aren’t that easy to come by.’

The door chime sounded and the Doctor realised he was holding his breath. The Inquisitor rolled her eyes and strode back to her desk, setting down her glass.

‘Enter.’

The attendant who’d left earlier now crept back in, glanced at the Doctor with a wary expression, then approached the dais.

‘Ma’am, it’s zero-eight-forty-five. You asked me to remind you when…’

‘Yes, thank you, I can recall,’ the Inquisitor replied. The attendant bowed and withdrew.

‘It would seem we are out of time,’ she went on.

‘Yes,’ the Doctor muttered. ‘I just need to…’ He gestured towards the door.

‘Of course. But Dolyn…’

The Doctor paused, hand on the door control, and looked over his shoulder.

‘Whatever they have you doing in there,’ she said. ‘Be careful.’

The Doctor forced a smile. ‘You too.’

He left her with her attendant and made his way back to the Valeyard’s office, breaking into a run whenever he was sure he was alone in the corridors. He punched the door control and strode through, looking around.

‘Bill, Nardole…’

The office was empty. The Doctor checked every corner and then looked around again, hoping there was just some optical trick from the dimensional engineering and his friends were really standing there, just out of sight, but still nothing. There was no Bill, no Nardole and, even more concerning, no Valeyard either. He quickly checked the TARDIS, calling out to his companions, but the ship sat quietly ticking over, and according to its internal sensors, was unoccupied. He tried Missy’s TARDIS as well just on the off chance, although he’d had the key in his pocket all day. There was no one there either. Panic threatened to strangle him. This was all his fault. He should never have left them alone here. An unwelcome image of Peri Brown came to him as he searched around for some clue as to what had happened. The doctored footage from the trial room played again in his mind, only one moment, the victim was Peri, the next it was Bill. This is why it was better to travel alone.

There was nothing on the desk, no notes to say where they’d gone, but no bodies or great pools of blood either, so he tried to convince himself that was positive. No blaster scars on the walls. No miniaturised bodies. He pushed that image away before it had a chance to fully form. That was the other issue. He had no idea where the Master was.

The office doors gave a low hiss as their opening mechanism engaged. The Doctor turned, but the tiny bit of hope that noise had kindled fizzled out as Missy sauntered in. She surveyed the room, hands on hips, and frowned.

‘Do they know something we don’t? Where is everybody?’

‘I was about to ask you the same question,’ the Doctor replied.

Missy shrugged. ‘Been in the control room since you left. I’ve no idea what went on here.’

‘Really?’ He walked towards her, studying her expression for any hint of a lie. ‘Tell me, Missy, and tell me the truth if you know what’s good for you. Did you know?’

‘Know what?’

‘All your protestations, your so-called lapses in memory, how much of that was play-acting?’

She shook her head and edged a few steps backwards, but he kept close.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Did you know the Master was here?’ The anger in his voice surprised the Doctor and he saw Missy flinch just perceptibly, but he also saw nothing but confusion in her eyes. Was than an act, though? That was the problem with liars. It was so hard to believe them.

‘The Master?’ she repeated. ‘As in…’ She pointed at her chest and scowled at him. ‘You said he wasn’t… isn’t that why I’m trying to memorise all this script?’

‘He’s here,’ said the Doctor. ‘And moments after he tries to kill me, Bill, Nardole and the Valeyard all disappear. Do you call that a coincidence? So, where is he?’

‘I don’t know. I had no idea he… that I was here. I don’t remember. I told you.’

‘Yes, you did,’ the Doctor muttered. He walked away and paced a few times along the upper level of the office, before turning sharply to face her again. ‘Know this. If anything has happened to either of my friends and I learn you knew about it or had a hand in it, there will not be a corner of the cosmos far enough or dark enough for you to hide in.’

A bell tolled loudly in the room. The Doctor imagined it was ringing out across the whole station. Court was back in session.

‘You’re starting to sound like him,’ Missy said quietly. She glanced down at his robes and he got her meaning. It made him shiver, but there was no time to dwell on that. He wandered over to the mirror and checked his outfit, pushed his unruly hair back under his cap and made sure the perception filter and Missy’s TARDIS key were still safely in his pocket.

‘I have to go back in,’ he said. ‘I need you to find Bill and Nardole, and the Valeyard for that matter.’

‘Oh, right, you’re going to trust me, then?’

‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘But I am going to rely on your self-interest.’ He held up her TARDIS key. ‘No Bill, no Nardole, no TARDIS. Do we understand each other?’

Missy gave a curt nod. The Doctor returned the key to his pocket and brushed past her on his way to the door.

‘I didn’t know,’ Missy called after him. ‘You can believe me or not, it’s up to you.’

The Doctor paused, hand on the door control, but he didn’t turn around. A twinge of guilt knotted his stomach. Maybe he was wrong. He wanted to believe that, but there was no time to worry about Missy and her rehabilitation attempts at that moment. There was too much to worry about everywhere else, so much in fact that his hearts physically ached from the stress. Leaving someone else to look for his friends felt awful and wrong, but he couldn’t see any other way. He had to be in that trial room on time to ensure things went the way they were supposed to.

If he didn’t, the results could be far more catastrophic than the deaths of two humans. That was a horrible way to think about it but it was a fact. On his way back to the trial room, the Doctor couldn’t stop thinking about the possibilities if time were unravelled, if by some stupid error here, the Time War was affected. If the time lock was broken, he could only begin to imagine the horrors that would break forth. The Nightmare Child, the Horde of Travesties. All that evil might be free to roll across the universe once again and this time he might not be able to stop it. No, he told himself, he was doing the right thing.

He settled in at his podium and arranged his notes and papers, while the rest of the jury filed into their benches. A couple of them chatted, laughing, as if this were the Panopticon and they were out for a stroll. Fair enough, the Doctor thought, they might not be aware of just how much was at stake in these proceedings, but at the very least, they had a hand in deciding whether someone lived or died. You’d think a bit of solemnity wouldn’t go amiss.

‘Four days, they said, and then they’ll start the renovations on the second tower,’ he heard one of them say. ‘The engineer keeps telling me it’ll be marvellous when it’s finished. I said, ‘And when will that be? I’m already in my eighth regeneration. At this rate, I’ll have no more lives left to enjoy this blasted extension!’’

‘Where did you find him?’ asked another. ‘Your engineer?’

‘Oh, Joral there recommended him.’ The elderly Time Lord glanced over his shoulder – a difficult task in his stiff collar – at another man seated on the row behind him. ‘Last time I listen to you!’

‘I didn’t have the slightest bit of trouble, Lord Iravan,’ the Time Lord retorted. ‘I expect it’s your impossible requests that keep delaying the project. I mean, the man isn’t Omega. There are limits to what he can do with a battered old house like yours.’

They chuckled, but the Doctor just stared at them. He grabbed his case file and rifled through the various papers and loose leaves stuffed inside it until he found what he was looking for. He’d noticed it earlier but hadn’t thought it important, but that was where he knew the name Joral from. In amongst the other notes made by Dolyn and later, presumably, by the Valeyard, he found a handwritten list of the attendant jurors. Joral, Iravan, Ledia, Lokasrai, and several others. The writing was the Valeyard’s. He could tell that by the similarities to his own. But there was no doubt about it. All the names the wraiths had whispered in the Matrix were there.

He had no idea, however, what that meant, and tucked the list into his pocket as the court stood to mark the arrival of the Inquisitor. She met his gaze but only for an instant. She really was remarkably composed, the Doctor thought. No one in this room would know she and the Valeyard had ever met before. Surely there was some sort of rule against the two of them being involved. Conflict of interest and all that. Maybe she was used to keeping her cool, keeping every bit of feeling hidden. That was, after all, the Time Lord way.

Once she was at her seat, the Doctor sank back down into his chair and returned to his own notes, not that his plan could be relied on now. He’d actually started to feel in control before the recess, but now when he tried to get his head around what was to happen, it felt like the universe split into ribbons and streamed out of his grasp. When he was sure no one was looking, he checked his phone, but there were no messages.

Another flurry of whispers announced the arrival of the defendant. The other Doctor entered slowly, showing none of his usual bluster, and went to the dock without a word. The Doctor couldn’t allow himself to feel guilty about that too. He’d find out soon enough that things weren’t as bad as he thought. Upsetting himself was a minor concern in the scheme of things.

‘The court is now in session,’ said the clerk of the court, silencing the last of the murmurs and whispers. ‘The High Council of Gallifrey against the person known as The Doctor, case number thirty-four thousand, seven hundred and fifty-two stroke Y three. Her Excellency Lady Darkell presiding. Prosecuting counsel, Valeyard Dolyn. Defendant representing himself.’

Darkell, the Doctor thought. That was her name.

‘We are all aware of your feelings of sorrow, Doctor,’ the Inquisitor began. ‘Has the recess given you sufficient time to overcome the distress of your bereavement?’

Yes, thought the Doctor dryly, because a few hours is all it takes!

‘I doubt that there will ever be sufficient time for that, My Lady,’ replied the Sixth Doctor.

No, the Doctor thought, you can’t allow yourself to wallow. You have to be alert and see what’s going on around you.

‘May we not proceed, My Lady?’ he interrupted. ‘The cavalier manner in which the Doctor permitted his young companion to be destroyed militates against this charade of concern.’

‘The Doctor is fighting for his life, Valeyard,’ the Inquisitor chided. ‘However, I do take your point. Doctor, are you ready to present your evidence?’

‘Yes.’ He breathed deeply and composed himself. ‘Yes, I’m grateful to you, Madam, for according me the same privilege as the Valeyard and allowing me access to the Matrix. My excursion will be into the future.’

‘The future?’ asked the Doctor. ‘Is it going to be the Doctor’s defence that he improves?’ _And quite immeasurably so,_ he thought, and smiled slightly. Especially in terms of fashion sense.

‘Precisely,’ said his other self.

‘This I must see!’

‘My submission concerns a crisis which threatens the lives not only of a group of people confined together with no means of escape, but would, if unresolved, threaten every mortal being on the planet Earth.’

‘Proceed,’ said the Inquisitor. The room darkened as the Matrix screen activated and the next section of footage began.

***

Bill watched the display on the lift wall change as it continued to rise. She’d pressed the only button on its control panel, assuming it would take her and Nardole up one level, but so far it had been travelling upwards for about five minutes. The display twirled and changed but she couldn’t translate the Gallifreyan symbols. Maybe there was some other mechanism she’d missed that told it which floor to go to. Still, she thought, they’d checked the courtroom level and found no sign of the Doctor. There was nothing else to do but to try the rest of the station. She hadn’t quite anticipated, however, how large the place was. It hadn’t looked so big on the TARDIS monitors. Its rambling layout also came as a surprise. At first the courtroom level seemed to be a ring of corridor with rooms branching off but after ten minutes of wandering, Bill realised it was far more complicated than that, passages veering off randomly, some ending in dead ends, doors that opened onto blank walls.

‘Not half been mucking about with the internal dimensions,’ Nardole had remarked. ‘Must be when they did the changeover from scientific research, like the Doctor said, but there’s been some cowboys in here.’

They’d found the lift whilst opening doors on the off-chance they’d stumble across the Doctor – or, Bill tried not to think of the possibility, the Doctor’s body – and since she was sure they’d seen all of that level, it seemed a good idea to see where the elevator went. She tried to convince herself that every room they checked and found empty made it less likely anything had happened to the Doctor. He wasn’t the sort of person to go without a fight, Bill felt sure, so she imagined if he and the Master had come to blows, there would be wreckage, rooms turned over, charred remains of furniture, that sort of thing. And every room they checked and didn’t find a body or a blood stain, Bill tried to believe that meant there was a chance he was okay.

Finally, the mechanisms clunked and the lift came to a halt. The door slid open and they stepped out onto a metal walkway with a waist-high railing. The walkway clung to the walls of a huge, circular space, like it was some kind of balcony around a grand hall or something, but in the centre, a mass of pipes and cables rose right up and disappeared into the shadows of the impossibly high ceiling. There had to be a window up there, though, as when Bill craned her neck to try and see the top of the cable tower, she could make out stars glinting overhead. She remembered her glimpse of the station as the TARDIS had come in to land. There had been an array or spire of some sort right in the centre. That had to be where they were now.

Stepping forward, she leaned on the rail to look down at the room below, and her stomach lurched like it wanted to come out her throat. There was no room, no floor beneath them, just a drop that went on for what looked like miles. The cables and pipes continued downwards too and were lost in shadows far below. Further along she saw that the walkway branched, one section continuing around the wall while another shot out to join up with the cable tower. As she and Nardole picked their way carefully around the path, she saw two other walkways on the opposite side of the tower, so one at every hundred and twenty degrees of the circle. Whatever the bundle of cables and wires were, there were blinking lights and more twirling Gallifreyan symbols on small panels at the end of the gantry, a control panel maybe. More importantly, there was no sign of the Doctor. If he’d fallen, though… Bill looked again at the seemingly endless drop. She didn’t want to think about that.

‘Nothing here,’ she said.

A bell tolled ominously through the chamber, echoing in the expanse.

‘What do you think that is?’ Nardole asked. ‘An alarm or just the trial starting again?’

‘Let’s hope it’s the second one,’ Bill replied, but she couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if they started up again and there was no prosecutor. Would they postpone for a while or would that be the trial so off script that all their efforts to preserve the timeline were in vain? Would she notice the universe unravelling? Would it be a single moment thing like an atom bomb or would it be a slow and steady decay?

She found the lift door again but couldn’t see an obvious call button or control switch anywhere. Panic flared inside her. Surely there was some way to get back down. Why would they design the place with no way out? But then, like Nardole said, this station was a bit of a mess, design-wise. Could they have built lifts that only went up?

‘What do you reckon this is?’ she asked. ‘Engine room maybe?’

Nardole wandered away, heading along the gantry to the central tower. Bill followed, wary at first to step onto the flimsy looking steel structure but it was sturdy enough. There was another, narrower ledge around the tower, and at intervals there were panels of instruments, lights and symbols, none of which Bill understood.

‘Looks more like the main power lines,’ Nardole said. He looked over the rail at the chasm below. ‘Engines are probably down there somewhere.’

‘There has to be a way back down,’ Bill muttered. ‘Another door…’

A dull thud came from the opposite side of the chamber. Bill straightened and saw Nardole beside her do the same. She took a few steps further around the walkway until she could see past the central tower and spotted a figure in black standing in the doorway of what looked like another lift. The Master looked around, and Bill tugged Nardole back, hoping the tower would hide them. Footsteps clanged against the metal of the walkway, slow at first, then quickening and growing louder, then Bill felt the vibration as he stepped onto the ledge around the tower. He was just on the other side, a few feet away, no more.

If they moved, the Master would hear them. The Valeyard might’ve taken his weapon earlier but that didn’t mean the Master didn’t have a spare. Bill turned as silently as she was able and searched for options. Maybe he wouldn’t come around to this panel. Maybe if they just kept still.

Another clunk of machinery, this time from the far left. Another door opened, another elevator. Bill watched as the Valeyard stepped out with catlike grace and took in his surroundings. There was no way to duck out of his line of sight and their eyes met. Bill held still, waiting to see him draw a gun, but he just stared at her for a second, glanced across at the other side of the tower where the Master was presumably still up to something, then something like a warning flared in the Valeyard’s eyes and she saw him, quite clearly, mouth the word, ‘go’. Then he was on the third gantry, managing to move silently despite the delicate structure.

He stopped halfway, watching something to his left. Bill assumed it was the Master. He reached into his coat and pulled out a small pistol, took aim and fired. Bill felt the shot through the metal of the tower. She jumped in fright and had to grab the rail to steady herself, biting back the urge to cry out. She didn’t hear the thump of a corpse falling and wondered if the Master had gone over the rail, but then she the vibration through the walkway again. He was still there. She felt him take a few steps then pause.

‘You’re too late,’ he called out. ‘I’ve patched the trial room feed into the antenna. Everything that happens in there from now on will be broadcast across Gallifrey. The High Council’s treachery is about to become prime time viewing.’

‘Have you ever considered that the reason your schemes are so woefully unsuccessful might be your inability to keep any of them to yourself?’ asked the Valeyard. ‘All I have to do to stop you is destroy the antenna.’

‘And risk triggering a chain reaction in the power system that overloads the station’s engines? I think not. Face it, Valeyard, your plan has failed.’

Bill steeled herself and risked a few steps towards the gantry while the Master was distracted. She placed her feet carefully, trying not to make the metal grille clang or creak under her weight, aware all the while that the Valeyard was watching her, every so often throwing a sideways glance her way.

‘Why should you care what the High Council does or does not reveal to the public? You’re nothing but a renegade. When this Time War begins, you’ll be begging for their aid…’

‘I hardly think so. Though I will be watching with great interest. I imagine there will be many opportunities for someone like me when Gallifrey is finally gone. That is supposing this ‘Last Great Time War’ will even happen. The High Council have been drowning in their own incompetence since the Borusa scandal. All this talk of prophecy could merely be another ploy by the Lord President to protect his own administration. Not that it matters. What I said earlier to your doppelganger still stands. If the other races of the cosmos hear that Gallifrey is destined to fall, they will come in their millions to exploit that. A self-fulfilling prophecy would have just as satisfying an outcome.’

The Valeyard stared at the Master as if he were mad. ‘If it happens?’

‘The Matrix has always predicted wars and petty skirmishes. The Time Lords always survive. Like cockroaches, they’ll be scuttling around until the last syllable of recorded time. But, make it sound as if all is about to be lost, as though the very fabric of existence is in crisis, and that gives the High Council carte blanche to remove their opponents and impose their own regime. Don’t tell me the possibility hasn’t occurred to you.’

‘Have you seen the content of the Matrix prophecies? Have you actually read it?’

‘I know the gist of it,’ said the Master, off-handedly. ‘I heard the rumours like everyone else. I know there were a great many people on Gallifrey who take it seriously enough to want to prepare for war, and good luck to them. If they turn out to be right, I may even offer my services to the High Council, for the right price. I don’t mind playing my part in their inevitable destruction.’

‘You think they’ll pardon you in return for your help?’

‘I think it won’t matter either way. It will simply be a way to amuse myself while I await their destruction. I might ask for a position on the war council. I find it amusing to imagine the General and his witless inbreds at my command. The age of the renegade, Valeyard, that has a nice ring to it.’

‘There will be no new era, you imbecile. This isn’t a matter of politics. When this war begins, it will rage throughout all time and outside all time. More civilisations will perish than you could ever visit in your lifetime. Others will never have existed, while their ghosts stalk the cosmos, neither real nor unreal, beside the twisted degradations of a thousand worlds. You personally will witness atrocities that’ll send you screaming into the darkness.’

Bill allowed herself to breathe when she reached the outer walkway, though she knew they still had the problem of the lift doors to face. From her new position though, as she waited for Nardole to finish creeping along the gantry, she could see both Time Lords clearly. The Master had come out a short way from the control panel now and stood two or three feet along the walkway, the Valeyard facing him about six feet further on.

‘Why should you care?’ asked the Master. ‘All you want are the Doctor’s regenerations. Your tiresome existence is your only concern. And anyway, you yourself are proof that there will be life after this so-called Time War. Gallifrey vastly overestimates its own importance to the cosmos. The universe will continue on. You’re from the Doctor’s future, you’ve seen…’

‘Shall I tell you what I’ve seen in that future?’ asked the Valeyard, taking another step forward. ‘In linear terms the battles will rage on for around four centuries but linear terms will soon cease to apply. All across the universe, millions will die every day and then find themselves alive again as time is written and rewritten over and over by weapon after weapon. The Daleks and the Time Lords will rewrite history so often it’ll fall apart. Whole sectors of the universe will become so twisted in upon themselves that they will both cease to exist and never have existed all at once, and remain locked in eternal paradox, tearing themselves apart. Oh, but you will find your glory in it all, rest assured, until the Siege of the Chronotide, when those ‘witless inbreds’, as you put it, will find you cowering and screaming at the feet of the Multiform. By the end there will be Daleks swarming through the streets of Arcadia and bombarding the Capitol from orbit. Yes, the Doctor will survive, you’re right about that. But only by burning both the Time Lords and the Daleks out of existence.’

‘Now I know you’re lying. A war with the Daleks I might just believe but that the Doctor would end it, and with such violence?’ The Master gave a dry laugh. ‘His conscience would never allow it.’

‘There will be no other choice. On the final day, Gallifrey will burn, in order to save the rest of the universe. And as for the Doctor, let us just say, my existence is comprised primarily of his experiences during and after that war. The horrors and the regrets. The rest will pale by comparison. By the time he reaches his twelfth and hopefully final incarnation he will be ready to give up from the sheer weight of the atrocities he’s witnessed. Atrocities you will have to bear the weight of too, in your own way.’

The Master regarded him for a few seconds in silence. ‘It was you who transmitted the data from Gallifrey? To Andromeda?’

‘I had assumed that was you.’

The Master shook his head. ‘It would appear there are other traitors at work besides ourselves. How very reassuring. If irrelevant at present.’ He reached into his pocket and drew out a small gun made of some kind of clear plastic. ‘You appear to be in my way again.’

Bill felt something nudge her shoulder and glanced round to find Nardole at her side, his expression one of concern. She realised she’d stopped to listen to the confrontation going on. She’d heard the Doctor mention the Time War in passing but he’d never given details before. The few specifics she’d just heard made her feel queasy, like she’d had a hint of something that could be far more horrific, a footstep behind her on an empty road.

Nardole gestured to the next doorway and started towards it but he stopped suddenly. Bill didn’t see what was wrong at first but then the thing ahead of them shifted slightly and the movement made it clearer. It was, in shape at least, like one of the Time Lords on the trial jury, in the same weird collar and robes, only this one didn’t have a face and it fractured and parts of it faded out of view like a badly turned television picture. It was just standing there on the walkway, facing them, and although it had no eyes, Bill felt it was staring at them. She patted Nardole on the shoulder and gestured to him to try the way they’d come but when they turned, two more of the not-Time-Lords now stood where they themselves had been seconds before. There was no way past them.

Bill looked over to the gantry and caught the Valeyard’s eye again, saw him follow her gaze until he saw the creatures too. He frowned, but his lapse in concentration gave the Master his chance. Bill saw the other Time Lord barrel forward into the Valeyard and the two of them struggled. One of the guns – she couldn’t see whose – clattered over the rail and tumbled into the abyss. She didn’t hear it hit the floor. She glanced at the ghost-like figures to see if they might be distracted too but they still stood there, shimmering, staring straight at her and Nardole. Maybe they weren’t dangerous, though her instincts told her exactly the opposite. Still, they couldn’t just stand there all day. She tried taking a step towards the one on its own, the one ahead of them. As soon as she moved it edged nearer to her and looking over her shoulder, she saw the other two do the same, the three of them closing in.

An energy weapon whined and sparks flew from the central tower again, this time near the point where the gantry joined the ledge. Metal groaned. The gantry shook for a second as the Master shoved the Valeyard aside and made a run for the outer walkway. The Valeyard leaned on the railing for a moment to stop himself from losing balance, then started after him, but the gantry twisted, broke away from the central tower and swung downwards. It hit the outer wall with a deafening clang and hung vertical, swaying form inertia. Bill watched as the Valeyard hung onto the grille of what had been the floor. She could see the strain in his arm muscles as he tried to haul himself up, inch by inch. The Master, meanwhile, was headed for one of the lifts but pulled up short and glared at the ghost Time Lords.

‘Cloister wraiths,’ he said, looking bemused. ‘What are you doing here?’

The wraith blocking Bill’s path turned a hundred and eighty degrees without making a sound. It started towards the Master, who backed away. He still had his gun and fired a shot at the creature. It sailed straight through the thing’s body and hit the wall so near to Bill’s head that a few of the sparks seared her cheek. The wraith, as he called it, didn’t even pause. It kept on straight towards him. Out the corner of her eye, Bill saw the other two start to move as well and pulled Nardole out of the way just in time to avoid a collision. The other two glided past, following their comrade. Bill expected a chill as their spectral robes brushed by her but instead, the hairs on her arms stood on end, like the wraiths were charged with static electricity.

The Master turned and ran for the lift door. Bill didn’t see what he did but somehow he got the door open and ducked inside, firing at the wraiths again as he waited for the doors to close. For a while the wraiths just stood there, facing the barrier, then as quickly as they’d appeared, they shimmered again and vanished.

‘Right,’ said Nardole, ‘well that door works.’ He started off towards the lift the Master had just used. Bill followed, but as she passed the end of the broken gantry, she couldn’t help but look down. The Valeyard had made it nearly to the top. He only had a couple of feet still to go but his knuckles were white and his arms shook from the exertion.

‘Bill,’ Nardole called to her. She looked over and saw him standing by the lift door. He gestured towards it. ‘Come on.’

She had the Doctor to think of, Bill thought. She still had to find him. But what would the Doctor want her to do? What would the Doctor himself do?

She flung herself down onto the floor and held the railing with one hand, reaching down with the other.

‘Here,’ she shouted.

The Valeyard managed to pull himself up another few inches, looked up at her, teeth gritted, and then grabbed her outstretched arm. He was heavier than she’d expected and her shoulder ached from the effort of getting him over the lip of the walkway.

‘Bill!’ Nardole called again.

The Valeyard fell onto the grille floor beside her and sat for a moment, catching his breath. It took Bill a second to recover too.

‘Thank you,’ the Valeyard said. He grimaced, closing his eyes, doubled over and choked back a cry.

‘You all right?’ Bill asked.

He didn’t answer right away and stayed rigid for a few seconds before he finally exhaled and collapsed back to the floor.

‘What’s wrong?’ Bill tried again. ‘Did he shoot you?’

‘No. No, his aim always was atrocious. No, it takes a lot of energy to maintain my connection to the nervous system in this body. Exertion somewhat eats into my reserves.’

‘What are those things? What are Cloister wraiths?’

‘Bill.’ Nardole stomped over to her. When she glanced up at him, he looked furious, but she chose to ignore him for now.

‘They’re part of the Matrix security system,’ the Valeyard replied, still out of breath. ‘Sort of an antivirus mechanism. Some Time Lords die offworld or die violently and aren’t uploaded properly via the APC Net. They can become… those things you saw. But they shouldn’t be here on the station and they certainly shouldn’t be outside the Matrix.’

‘So why are they?’

‘Bill, we need to go,’ Nardole insisted. He took her arm and pulled her to his feet. Bill shook him off and gave a warning look dire enough to make him recoil. He was right, though, so as a conciliatory gesture, she stepped back, heading again for the lift.

‘Is he dead?’ she asked. ‘The Doctor? My Doctor I mean? Did the Master kill him?’

The Valeyard gave a pained smile. ‘The Master has been trying to kill the Doctor for centuries and never succeeded. What makes you think he’s managed it this time?’

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘In the trial room, I expect.’ He coughed and closed his eyes again. If it was an act, it was convincing. He looked pale and ill, sweat starting to plaster his hair to his forehead and temples. But Nardole tapped her arm again and Bill nodded. It didn’t feel right to leave someone in obvious pain but she told herself they had to. Even if the Doctor was all right and was back in the trial, they had their part still to play, and as the Doctor kept saying throughout this mess, the timelines were the priority here.

‘Tap the centre of the door,’ the Valeyard called over to them as they reached the lift. Nardole looked wary but he tried, and a pattern of circles lit up in blue inside the metal surface of the door. It slid open to reveal the elevator beyond.


	10. Error Messages

The darkness of the trial room had almost started to feel comfortable as the Doctor listened idly to the Matrix footage. He hadn’t watched a lot of it and at the back of his mind, he wondered about sitting there fairly passive throughout this section, when before he’d interrupted the flow of proceedings roughly every ten minutes, but it had taken a while, once everything settled and the footage started, to get his mind in order, put aside all his other concerns and remember what he was supposed to be doing. He doodled on his notepad to help himself concentrate and risked a glance now and then at his other self, even the occasional telepathic prod, but the Sixth Doctor had his defences up again.

He checked his phone whenever he was sure no one was looking, as the glow from the screen would show up like a spotlight in the darkness, but there were no messages. He still wondered if he should’ve abandoned the trial to look for Bill and Nardole. The idea of them out there on the station somewhere, with the Valeyard and the Master on the loose, left a leaden feeling in his stomach. The decision was made, though, and he was stuck in this room for the time being. Glancing up at the screen, he saw his Sixth incarnation and his companion, Mel, in the gymnasium of the Hyperion III.

‘My dear Melanie,’ the Sixth Doctor said, ‘if you wish to pursue this completely arbitrary course, pray hurry along to the hydroponics centre, and leave me to my static and solitary peregrinations.’

When the lights came up, it took the Doctor a minute to realise he hadn’t done anything and that the interruption came from the other podium.

‘Hold it! Just a minute,’ said the other Doctor. ‘I don’t remember that.’

‘How could you remember?’ asked the Inquisitor. ‘These events are in your future.’

‘But I reviewed that section earlier when I was preparing my defence. There have been changes.’

Oh right, the Doctor thought, that’s where we are. He’d thought there would be a few more minutes’ thinking time at least, but now he rose, stiffly.

‘That isn’t what happened,’ the Sixth Doctor went on. ‘The girl, Melanie. Her information was important. I wouldn’t have just ignored it. Completely uncharacteristic and the words – misused, didn’t even sound like mine.’

‘What isn’t completely uncharacteristic is this resort to excuses and subterfuge,’ said the Doctor. ‘To gloss over the death of Peri, the Doctor conveniently presents us with another companion…’

‘Hardly a convenience, Valeyard,’ the Inquisitor rebuked. ‘These events are in the Doctor’s future. He would not have met the young woman yet.’

And does no one other than me find that odd, the Doctor thought. ‘I stand corrected. But my assumption of why he has pursued such an arbitrary course in aborting this tale still remains.’

He spoke directly to the dock, pressing the message home telepathically as well. The only way he could’ve been more obvious would be to hold up a neon placard at the same time.

‘Arbitrary course?’ repeated the Sixth Doctor.

The Doctor couldn’t completely hide his smile. Come on then, genius, he thought. You’re nearly there. Little bit more and you’ll work it out. Then we can both get out of here in time for tea.

***

The elevator took Bill and Nardole first to what looked like a maintenance deck full of wires and machinery Bill couldn’t begin to identify, but then after a few more prods and punches on its control panel its doors at last opened onto the familiarly dull courtroom level corridors. Bill had started to hate the sight of them but now they brought such a wash of relief. She wondered how long they’d been gone and how much had happened in the meantime.

‘Where to?’ Nardole asked.

‘The Valeyard’s office,’ Bill said. She’d given the matter a lot of thought in the lift. ‘If the Doctor’s in the trial room, we’ll be able to see on the monitor. If he’s not, there might be scanners or something in there, or in the TARDIS, that’ll help us find him.’

It only took another ten minutes’ walking before she spotted doors and junctions in the hallways that she recognised. When she saw the office doors ahead she jogged forward, but paused before going inside. The corridor that continued on away from the Valeyard’s office followed a shallow curve and just around the corner, she made out a pair of silver boots sticking out, someone slumped on the floor by the looks of it. She heard Nardole protest as she hurried towards the figure but she paid him no attention. He should be used to that by now, she thought.

Around the turn in the passage, she found a man in a guard’s uniform sitting with his back against the wall, one knee drawn up to his chest. She recognised him as the captain who had passed her ages ago. Or it felt like ages ago. Then, though, he’d been poised, one of those soldiers who just radiated authority and a kind of nobility. Now, his mouth was slack, his eyes unfocused. Even when she shook his shoulder, he didn’t react.

‘Hey,’ she said softly, ‘you all right?’

His head lolled onto his shoulder and his body slid away from her, crumpling to an untidy heap on the floor. Nardole was by her side and crouched down, pressing his fingers against the guard’s throat for a pulse.

‘Well, his hearts are still beating,’ Nardole concluded. He waved a hand in front of the guard’s unblinking eyes. There was no reaction. ‘Mind’s completely shut off though. Some sort of psychic attack maybe.’

‘Was it the Valeyard?’

‘Or the Master.’ He slipped the guard’s arm around his shoulders and struggled to get him to his feet. Bill went to the opposite side and held the captain’s waist. The man had to be about six foot five and towered over them, but the two of them managed to shuffle him to the door and into the office. They laid him on the couch and stepped back, Nardole huffing from the effort.

‘No idea what we can do,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘The Doctor might know.’

He sighed and wandered over to the monitor, fiddled around with the controls for a moment then stood back as the picture appeared.

‘Another death, Doctor? But for the caprice of chance, the victim would have been your companion, Mel.’

Bill could have hugged the screen if it wasn’t built into the wall. The Doctor was alive.

‘Well, that’s one thing at least,’ Nardole muttered.

Bill nodded. She felt exhausted all of a sudden and eyed the couches in the corner with longing but she knew it would be a while yet before she’d get to rest.

‘Right,’ she said, ‘then unless we hear otherwise, I think we just have to stick to the plan. Do you remember what he said it was to happen? I can’t…’

‘Something about complaining that he can’t find witnesses,’ said Nardole. ‘I was hoping I’d know it when I heard it. Anyway, a second here or a second there isn’t going to destroy the timeline.’

No, Bill thought to herself. Course it wouldn’t. They would be fine. The Doctor was all right. He looked unharmed and he was carrying on with the trial so no one could have noticed anything was amiss so far. They would be fine. They had their plan, they had instructions from the Doctor and they just had to be there at the right time. The Master wanted the trial to be broadcast, that was all, and he’d managed that now so he’d probably be long gone. It would be fine.

As she followed Nardole into the TARDIS to get ready, however, she realised she had failed to convince herself of any of that.

***

Missy made no real effort to find the Doctor’s little friends. If they were lost, that was their bad luck, although it would mean another moralistic rant once the Doctor got out of court, assuming he ever did. Hopefully something would kill him and spare her the lecture. Trying to improve herself was one thing. Trying not to kill people she could just about handle, but she was growing extremely tired of babysitting.

At first, she enjoyed the feeling of liberty as she wandered the station’s corridors, but after a while, the banal décor grew irritating and she had to remember that Zenobia was going to blow up soon to cheer herself up. Time Lords in this era had no sense of style. They had lost the grandiose Gothic of the days of Rassilon when being a Time Lord really meant something and everyone stomped about in elaborate robes, blowing up planets just because they were bored and thought that section of the universe really needed a nebula to jazz it up.

At least that’s how Missy had always imaged that period of her history. She should’ve been born in that age, in the time of the Death Zone and the war against the Vampires and the Hand of Omega. It was no wonder this lot were headed for a massacre at the hands of the Daleks. They’d lost their spines. The great Time Lords would just sweep a hand across the cosmos and erase their enemies from history, but these ones? No, they’d rather set up this elaborate pantomime to get rid of the Doctor rather than just show some initiative and kill him outright.

She sauntered round the corner of one of the endlessly dull corridors and spotted a figure ahead. Apprehension and interest fought a little battle inside her for a moment and in the end, interest won out. She recognised the Valeyard from his suit, even though he was hunched over and staggering away from her, one hand on the wall to steady himself. Missy never could resist the sight of a weakened enemy.

The Valeyard lurched towards a doorway up ahead, punched a code into the locking mechanism on the wall then practically fell inside. Missy hurried and slipped in before the door slid closed. She found herself back in the Matrix sub control room and watched as the Valeyard, oblivious to her presence, made it to the console and started fiddling with the screens and switches. When he went around to the controls on the other side, he finally looked up and saw her standing there, but Missy also got her first good look at his face for a while.

‘You look awful,’ she said. ‘Are you dying? Do you want any help with it?’

He was pale with a sheen of sweat on his face, and though he’d loosened the collar of his black shirt, he was still struggling to draw breath. He glowered at her for a moment then continued whatever he was doing with the Matrix controls.

‘I think I may have solved the mystery of your amnesia,’ he said.

‘I know,’ Missy replied. ‘I’m here somewhere. The Doctor told me. Shouldn’t you know he’s already told me, if you’re him and you’ve already done all this?’

He left the console and made for the couch by the wall, grabbing the two sensors that still dangled at the end of their wires, connected to the bodged-up interface with the Matrix. Collapsing onto the couch, he pressed the sensors to his temples then tensed in some sort of convulsion. It didn’t kill him, unfortunately, and only lasted a few seconds, but at the end of it he was gasping even more for breath.

‘What’s the plan then?’ Missy asked. ‘Go into the Matrix, kill the Doctor from inside there? Is that it? Asking for a friend.’

‘Go away.’

She sat daintily on the edge of the couch beside him. ‘Not very nice, is it? And here’s me trying to help. Why are you dying? Is it something I did?’

‘Sorry to disappoint you.’

He rolled over onto his back and lay for a moment with his eyes closed. Missy’s gaze strayed to the exposed skin of his throat. She’d always thought that her favourite spot on humanoids. So vulnerable. Terrible evolutionary design, really, having so many vital connections all in that one, poorly defended little neck. Did the no-killing rule apply to the Valeyard, she wondered. She couldn’t help herself any longer and trailed her hand down his neck from his ear to his shoulder, all the time fighting the urge to dig her fingers in tighter and crush his trachea. Wouldn’t do much good anyway in a Time Lord with a respiratory bypass, but it was one of her favourite feelings.

‘You and I could’ve been friends, you know,’ she said.

He let out a dry laugh but still didn’t open his eyes. Missy leaned in closer, one hand pressed against his chest. Through his shirt she could feel how rapidly his hearts were beating. He really was in a bad way.

‘You and me against the Doctor,’ she went on. She gave him a light kiss on the lips. ‘We could’ve burned up the stars.’ She brushed his sweat-matted hair back from his forehead and kissed him again, fully this time, then she sprang back to her feet. ‘Shame you’re dying.’

She laughed, but as she turned around, her smile dropped. Standing in the middle of the control room, looking straight at her as far as she could tell, was the shimmering, static-riddled figure of a Cloister wraith in full robe and collar.

‘Are you doing that?’ she asked.

‘Doing what?’ the Valeyard replied, barely above a whisper. He sounded like he was losing consciousness. The wraith turned slowly to look at the console as if it had sensed the changes she and later the Valeyard had made. It glided silently over the floor, phased in and out of existence for a second as it reached the control panel, then with a crack of static electricity, it vanished. Missy went over and checked the monitors. The console gave her a light shock when she first touched it, enough to sting, but she persevered and brought up a usage display for the system. Earlier, when she’d been working with the Doctor, she’d seen a tiny spike in some parts of the APC Net. The graphs were now dancing all over the place, peaks like daggers in the Matrix’s processors.

Something was taxing the system and she didn’t think it could be the screen in the trial room. There’d been a particularly large spike just before the wraith disappeared, readings all off the scale. Missy wondered if that had been connected to the wraith’s appearance, though she had never heard of one getting out of the Matrix or its cloisters before. When she examined the in-depth system log, however, she noticed from the processes involved that the data spike had been an upload to the Matrix, zettabytes of information. Something like that… she thought back to her classes at the Academy on APC infrastructure and networking… it was the kind of thing you’d expect to see when the memories of a deceased Time Lord were uploaded to the Matrix.

An idea struck her and she looked around slowly at the couch by the wall. The Valeyard appeared to have passed out and when she went over to check him, was breathing more easily, hearts beating in a quickened but no longer unhealthy rhythm. She gave a slight prod telepathically and felt a chill in return. Protective coma, she decided, and she felt pretty sure she knew what had happened.

The Valeyard had left the building. Or his body, at least.

Shame, she thought. It had been a decent body and it would’ve made a pretty corpse. She watched the sleeping Time Lord on the couch for a while, chin propped on her hand, and debated what to do with herself next. Something bleeped on the console next to her and she glanced idly at the displays, expecting another power spike on the graphs but instead, it was the list of active programmes that was flashing and twirling notifications at her, like a small child wanting attention.

‘New processes detected,’ it read. She wondered if it wanted applause or something and dismissed the alert so she could read the list of things currently running. It took a second to put all the information into one place and make a whole picture, to figure out what all those individual systems could work together to do, then she felt a little frisson of excitement.

‘Oh,’ she said to herself with a grin, ‘that’s going to cause a few problems.’

***

The Keeper frowned at the latest reams of diagnostic information twirling around on his screen. None of it made sense. The power usage was far too high, as was memory drain in the APC Net, and yet there was no sign of any failures in the station systems. There was also no hint in any of his systems checks to suggest what was causing the imbalance in the Matrix. One dialogue suggested the whole system was about to implode while another reported that everything was running normally. Even for the Matrix, this was odd. He wished he’d brought a few technicians along with him, but the High Council had been so strict about security, the amount of paperwork they wanted just to get clearance to come to the station let alone to have access to any of its systems was more than he’d been willing to wade through. Now, though, he could really have used someone to send off into the inner workings of the interface chambers to see what was going on.

He set another diagnostic programme to run, then the comms unit on his desk screeched to tell him someone was calling.

‘Yes?’

‘Keeper, your presence is requested in the trial room,’ said a voice. It sounded like the clerk of the court, though the Keeper wasn’t entirely sure.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘You are required to give evidence.’

‘What?’ The Keeper felt his stomach sink again. What could they possibly want him for? A lump of ice formed in his gut. Had this been the plan? Had the Valeyard somehow managed to expose their plans? Had he been working with Alzath and that faction all along?

He sat for a moment, debating whether to find some excuse, then chided himself for foolishness and made his way along to the trial room. After all, if everything had been exposed, it was the High Council’s secrets, not his, that would be out in the open. He had only done his job. It wasn’t his fault if the Lord President used his Matrix for less than honest ends.

He came to the small foyer directly outside the trial room and glanced, out of habit, at the stained glass doorway to his right, one of several entrances to the Matrix interface chambers. He froze. He felt sure the door had shifted slightly. The pattern in the stained glass made it hard to tell, as the designs often gave those doors a kind of optical illusion and a sense of movement, but he was certain it had just slid the last inch or so into its housing, as if he’d just caught someone in the act of going into the chamber. If someone was using the Matrix that would explain some of the power drain, he supposed. An instinct deep within him said he should investigate, but a louder voice in his mind said he was better off not knowing. Whatever the High Council were up to, plausible deniability was going to be his best defence.

He wandered over to the door and checked it really was closed, just in case there was an error in the opening mechanisms, causing the door to stick perhaps, but it was sealed. Nodding to himself, the Keeper decided he’d been mistaken anyway. After all, he was the only one who had the key. No one else could get in there without him knowing.

There were raised voices coming from the trial room doors. Whatever was going on in there, it didn’t sound civil. The Keeper sighed and braced himself to head up the stairs and inside, but as he turned from the Matrix door, he paused again.

‘What the…’

A cloister wraith drifted aimlessly around the end of the corridor, turning slow circles over the spot the Keeper had just passed. Something about its movements suggested panic and confusion, like an animal that had found itself trapped and couldn’t comprehend how it got there or where it was.

There was going to be trouble over this. The Keeper frantically ran over the programming he’d added and the updates installed when he was setting up the station. It wasn’t his fault if some stray code had sneaked through, he told himself. He’d been doing this all by himself, no assistants. The High Council had insisted. He hadn’t been responsible for the actual programming and coding of the Matrix for seven centuries. That was the whole point in going for promotion through the ranks, so that he didn’t have to actually sit and fiddle with the details any more.

‘Return to your parent server,’ he told the Wraith, his hand on the Matrix key on its panel on his robes. He had developed a habit of clutching at it like a talisman whenever he was nervous.

The wraith turned to face him, then went back to roaming around that small space in the corridor.

‘Return to the main network,’ the Keeper ordered. Again, the wraith paused, considered him for a moment, and looked as if it was actually trying to process its instructions. Then it rushed towards him, arms outstretched. The Keeper stumbled, tried to move aside, lost his footing and hit the floor with a painful thud that rattled up his spine. The wraith sailed past, but its robes brushed the Keeper’s hand and a crackle of static danced across his skin. Needle-sharp pains went with it. The wraith dissipated into nothing as it reached the wall but the smell of ozone remained in the air long after it was gone. The Keeper rubbed his hand until the ache subsided and scrabbled back to his feet, thinking that the only consolation he had was that no one had seen the incident and his loss of dignity.

Once he felt calm again, he approached the trial room doors and knocked. A guard admitted him from inside and he stepped up onto the platform beside the Valeyard’s desk. He did risk a glance at the man as he passed, but the Valeyard was intent on his files, scribbling something down on a garish orange notepad. Across the room, though, the Doctor was on his feet, jaw set, brow furrowed.

‘Ah, good,’ said the Inquisitor, with a hint of weariness in her tone that implied she’d been kept waiting longer than she was accustomed to. The Keeper bowed, hoping he didn’t still look flustered after the incident outside.

‘I came as soon as I could, My Lady,’ he said.

‘Thank you, Keeper.’ She turned back to the defendant. ‘Doctor, do you have any further evidence in your defence?’

The Keeper clasped his hands in front of him and studied the faces of the jury, looking for any hint that he was in trouble. He saw none, but the other Time Lords did seem a little bewildered.

‘Do you still maintain the Matrix has been tampered with?’ he heard the Inquisitor ask. Frowning, he returned his attention to the discussion.

‘Yes, Madam, I do,’ the Doctor replied haughtily. ‘All I do not yet understand is who did it and why.’

‘Tampered with?’ the Keeper muttered under his breath. He looked on instinct to the Valeyard, who was on his feet now, but facing the dock, so the Keeper was unable to glimpse his reaction or his expression.

‘Your accusation would be laughable were it not so outrageous,’ said the Inquisitor. ‘However, as you see, I have summoned the Keeper of the Matrix. Keeper?’

‘My Lady?’

‘You have heard the Doctor’s allegations. Is it at all possible for the data stored within the Matrix to be tampered with in any way?’

The Keeper swallowed. He had the distinct feeling that he’d just been placed on the gaming board but he had no idea which piece he was or even which side he was playing for.

‘Quite impossible, My Lady,’ he said. ‘No one may enter the Matrix without the Key of Rassilon.’

Even as he said it, the Keeper felt his insides twist even tighter. It was technically true that no one could access the Matrix interface without his permission but then the High Council always had their means, and his mind circled back to the diagnostician, Alzath, once again, hanging there in the cloisters. Any security system could be breached if the criminals had enough intelligence and determination. He wasn’t about to say that in court, however.

***

Bill checked her outfit in the mirror. They hadn’t found any photos, even in the TARDIS memory banks, so it was hard to tell if she was wearing the stuff right, but these clothes were the closest she could find to the outfit the Doctor described from memory. Bill tried to convince herself that it didn’t matter if she was dressed exactly right. This was just to help the perception filter along a little, after all. Even without a change of clothes, everyone should see her as the slim, fiery haired girl who’d travelled with the Doctor on the Hyperion III.

Bill supposed the filter must alter her voice as well, or at least allow others to hear her as Mel rather than herself. That was a little freaky, trying to think that everyone else would hear her a couple of octaves above her normal speaking voice. She’d found a royal blue jumpsuit and matching boots in the TARDIS wardrobe, that were stored in an old trunk, Harry Potter-style, with a label that said, ‘Mel B’.She decided this was ‘Melanie Bush’ and not Scary Spice. Thing was, you could never be sure with the Doctor. The boots had kitten heels and Bill had to practice for a while to be able to walk properly in them. Her feet would be killing her if she had to keep these on for a while though. There was a loose turquoise jacket and a wide, blue, faux leather belt in the trunk as well, so Bill figured this was one complete outfit. The turquoise and white polka-dot affair with the puff sleeves she left behind. Fashion sense had definitely deserted the TARDIS at that point in its history.

Nardole didn’t have the luxury of a wardrobe change and when she returned to the console room, Bill found him fiddling with his perception filter with an obvious air of concern.

‘It’s all programmed,’ she reassured him. ‘It’ll be fine.’

‘Using a telepathic device in a room full of Time Lords, all of whom are telepathic,’ he muttered. ‘What could go wrong?’

‘The Doctor says they’re only mildly telepathic.’

‘How comes he always knows when I want to tell him off and disappears, then?’

‘Maybe because you’re predictable?’

Bill clipped her perception filter onto her belt and picked her way carefully across to the doors, still getting used to the heels. Nardole let out a deep, dramatic sigh, then she heard him following after her. She smiled and patted him on the shoulder, but she was shaking inside. Nardole was right. They were about to walk into a room full of Time Lords, people the Doctor had always hinted were some of the most powerful in the universe, and they were going to try and trick them. Even supposing they managed to preserve the timeline and the chain of events, what if they were caught? What was Time Lord justice like for aliens who’d sneaked on board their high security court room station and messed around with the proceedings?

From the quick glance she got at the monitors as they crossed the Valeyard’s office, the evidence was either finished or had been interrupted again. Bill didn’t pause to hear what the Doctor and his other self were arguing about though. It had to be about time for their cue.

At least, Bill thought, she was starting to know her way around this part of the station. They had one long stretch of corridor to get down, then a sharp turn to the right at the end would take them into the small foyer where the other Doctor’s TARDIS was parked. The doors to the trial room would be just opposite that. About halfway along the hallway though, Bill realised something was different. It took another few steps before she figured out what it was. A low humming sound was coming from the direction of the foyer, growing louder as they came closer. It died away eventually, but then came a series of scuffles and voices. One male and gruff, one female and shrill. With a shiver, Bill realised she knew the voice, or at least she’d heard it very recently. On the Matrix screen in the trial room.

She gestured to Nardole to wait, holding him back as he strode towards the turn in the corridor. Pressing her finger against her lips for silence, she crept towards the corner and stood with her back against the wall, listening.

‘As a matter of total disinterest,’ said the girl, ‘who are you?’

‘Oh,’ replied the man, ‘Sabalom Glitz. And you?’

‘Melanie. Known as Mel.’

‘Are they all like you here?’

‘I don’t know. Shall we go and find out?’

Footsteps followed, heading away from them.

‘But…’ Nardole began.

Bill peered around the corner, then stepped out when she saw that the other two had gone. Two coffin-like pods lay open on the floor of the foyer. Some kind of transport capsule, Bill guessed, each big enough for one person.

‘That’s not good,’ Nardole said quietly.

When a hand landed on Bill’s shoulder, she nearly jumped a foot in the air and had to stifle back a scream. But when she turned, it was only Missy looking back at her, a glint of mischief in her pale blue eyes. The Time Lady smirked, obviously pleased that she’d startled them.

‘Just so you know,’ Missy whispered. ‘Someone activated the Time Scoop a couple of minutes ago. I think I, as in the other me, is going to bring in witnesses, which could kind of scupper the Doctor’s plan.’

‘You don’t say?’ sneered Nardole, with a nod towards the two pods.

‘Oh,’ replied Missy, feigning surprise. She bit her lip then smiled again. ‘Uh-oh. And, by the way, the Valeyard’s managed to escape back into the Matrix so could be up to anything in there now, and I can’t find me either, so all in all, I think it’s a bit of a mess really.’

‘What do we do?’ Nardole asked.

‘We have two TARDISes,’ Missy replied. ‘We could just leave them to it and find a nice beach somewhere…’

‘We’re not going anywhere,’ Bill said. She got her phone out of her pocket and rattled off a text message. Honestly, if anyone ever found her phone and read some of these they’d think she was insane.

_Glitz and Mel are here, as in the real ones,_ she wrote, _also Missy says V is in the Matrix. What do we do? B._

**Author's Note:**

> TBC. I'm posting as I edit, so although the story's currently complete, I'm leaving the chapter number vague as I'm not sure if it'll change. The story at the moment runs to around 80,000 words, though. I'm going to aim to post an update once a week.


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